Search
engines rely on the terms queried by users to determine which results
to put through their algorithms, order and return to the user. But,
rather than simply recognizing and retrieving exact matches for query
terms, search engines use their knowledge of semantics (the science
of language) to construct intelligent matching for queries. An
example might be a search for loan
providers
that also returned results that did not contain that specific phrase,
but instead had the term lenders.
The
engines collect data based on the frequency of use of terms and the
co-occurrence of words and phrases throughout the web. If certain
terms or phrases are often found together on pages or sites, search
engines can construct intelligent theories about their relationships.
Mining semantic data through the incredible corpus that is the
Internet has given search engines some of the most accurate data
about word ontologies and the connections between words ever
assembled artificially. This immense knowledge of language and its
usage gives them the ability to determine which pages in a site are
topically related, what the topic of a page or site is, how the link
structure of the web divides into topical communties and much, much
more.
Search
engines' growing artificial intelligence on the subject of language
means that queries will increasingly return more intelligent, evolved
results. This heavy investment in the field of natural language
processing (NLP) will help to achieve greater understanding of the
meaning and intent behind their users' queries. Over the long term,
users can expect the results of this work to produce increased
relevancy in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and more
accurate guesses from the engines as to the intent of a user's
queries.