Author: David Amerland
Publisher: Que
Pages: 240
ISBN: 978-0789751348
Audience: Website owners, web marketers, product marketers
Rating: 5
Reviewer: Sue Gee
The premise of this book is that Google search, is changing and that anyone involved with marketing and the web needs new strategies to match.
Although many web users think of search as how we find things on the web, this book looks at it from the other side of the coin and takes the view:
Search, above all else is marketing, and it is undergoing a massive change.
The problem it tackles is how to be visible on the web and to take advantage of the new features introduced by Google in its move to "semantic search.
The first chapter asks "What Is Semantic Search" and we get much more than a definition. Of course, David Amerland does provide a definition which includes the fact that "Semantic" from the Greek means "meaning". He continues:
In search on the Web, semantic search marks the transition from a "dumb" search of single pages that have a probabilistic value of containing the information we are looking for to an intelligent search that delivers real answers or leads us to the very answer we are looking for on a web page that has nothing to do with the search query we used and therefore would not have come up with in the traditional keyword-activated results of the past.
Later in the book there's a further note on the etymology of "semantic":
Actually the real meaning of the word is importance pertaining to meaning
So rest assured if you feel inclined to quibble with the "short version" given at the start of the book. This is a book that adds depth as it progresses.