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Semantic Search Engines - Forget the Way You Searched Before

The Internet community full of buzz about semantic search engines and what changes they can bring to Internet marketing and SEO.

This gave me an idea to make a testing comparison-research of Google.com and Hakia.com (semantic search engine, in beta version) to check the 'usefulness' of their search results.

Test Rules:

I have done testing search in different terms, usually going 2-3 pages deep (each page had 10 results). This means my research cannot be representing the fully objective picture. But as typical surfers usually don't go deeper than 2-3 pages, the rules for comparison are following the natural pattern of search. In any case, I tried to be very objective, because I am not working at Google or Hakia.

Search Query - Search Engine Optimization.

Google.com: displayed wikipedia link; gave some links to forums and to SEO companies; but it's important to mention that most of the results where - index pages of websites, as if Google was helping you to find industry leaders (SEO companies or forums).

Hakia.com: gave more links to the pages where educational info about SEO was published (usually article directories); also some communities (again, more to the pages where SEO basics are touched); also links news, but for some reason they were broken - maybe it's a problem of a beta version.

Summary: Google was showing more industry leaders (SEO companies or forums or communities), Hakia was more inclined to display content about what is SEO.

Search Query - Website Hosting Mistakes.

Google.com: mostly the pages with articles on all types of sites, popular article directories or nicely established niche sites with articles about this topic published.

Hakia.com: the same to Google, and many matches - links to the same content, sometimes on the same sites.

Summary: both search engines when it comes to the educational type of content were quite good and displayed the articles that really helped to explain typical website hosting mistakes; this can be a good sign that Google indeed cares about content and maybe already plays the semantic game.

Search Query - Payment Solution.

Google.com: mostly the industry majors that provide all types of payment solutions.

Hakia.com: also some industry majors, but a lot less then Google gave; plus very often Hakia was showing sites that had no relations to payment solutions (e.g. some IT companies that in their list of products and services).

Summary: Google was really helpful as instantly showed the leaders of the industry for people to choose the best solutions, Hakia for some reason came into the trap when it was not showing much of the educational content about payment solutions and also gave many companies that had did not have real connection to the topic.

Search Query - BMW Z4 Coupe.

Google.com: many reviews, road tests and news from the nicely established niche sites (among them - car sellers); strange but the first link from official BMW site was quite low in the results.

Hakia.com: one of the top links was the one from official site where I could play with colors of this great car and had its review; also many niche news, forums, magazines and car sellers.

Summary: Hakia turned to be quicker in sending me to the official page, perhaps here the semantic content helped to find the car's official details, but on this very query the results can be estimated as pretty equal.

Overall Research Summary.

When doing the testing searches, I could not explain to myself what exactly is 'wrong' with Hakia, and then I got it...

Google seems to be binding us to the sites that fit the search demand, and Hakia binds us to the content. As we got used to Google's way, it was quite tough to get used to the new pattern of results. Especially this is evident when you want to see offers (industry toppers, service providers, sellers, etc.) and instead you see the "educational how-to" about this topic.

This is neither the drawback of Hakia, nor the advantage of Google. But this gives a really different experience of search. At some moment I thought that I completely lost my searching skills and had to start learning again.

Hakia needs to solve some problems. The display broken links of news is any easy one, I think they will solve it very quickly. But more of a problem was the example with 'payment solutions' where I did not get some educational info about what payment solutions are and how to use them, and did not get real help of finding the industry leaders. I thought that the semantic content approach will at least give me some educational stuff about payment solutions - nop.

Internet Marketing and SEO Future.

My opinion is that semantic search does not bring any danger and any big changes to those who have been working with their sites properly. Everything is like it used to be before - good content, some reasonable on-page optimization, trust in the eyes of search engines and backlinks from authority sites - and you have good and stable positions in search engines.

This SEO research in original version
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posted by fdwvsmr92018 @ 3:34 PM