Semantic Pay-Per-Click?

Semantic Search is a term that’s been floated around the online industry for a few years now, but we’re only recently starting to see real progress in this area.

For those not in the know – it refers to the ability of a user to search in natural language phrases, and for the search engine to understand that natural language – rather than just returning results based on the main keywords within your search. To illustrate the power of semantic search – this would mean a query such as “where can I buy trainers”, would return local results of sports shops, not just websites optimised for the keyword “buy trainers”. Yes, this is big; this is the next-level of search.

A while ago Microsoft spent $100m (£57.5m) on semantic start-up Powerset, for their unique technology. In the last few weeks, Ask.com introduced 3 new technologies – Direct Answers from Search, Databases & Answer Farms. Their answers now not only come from sources on the web, but databases not online as well as “answer farms” like Yahoo Answers. Certainly impressive stuff, as Cesar Mascaraque (Ask.com’s European MD) suggests in New Media Age magazine - “There’s no doubt that we’re ahead of Google and Microsoft on this”.

But the question has to be asked – how will the semantic trend affect paid search? It’s an important question too: the PPC industry was worth £981m in the first 6 months of 2008 according to the latest IAB figures.

No doubt broad matching algorithms will need to be developed a lot further than their current state, and we could even see a switch to phrase and exacts being more popular for those who like to run an efficient pay-per-click campaign.

In the same NMA article, a Google spokesman comments “We have no plans to adapt AdWords to fit a more semantic model. However, although the two algorithms [natural and paid] aren’t linked, the models do evolve in tandem.”

It would seem then, that learning from natural search to evolve paid search is high up on Google’s agenda, and in the years to come, through small tweaks and changes to AdWords, we may find ourselves having to think semantically about PPC.