Brad Reed of PCWorld recently shared his insight into why Google is wise to integrate more semantics into their search algorithm. Reed writes, “Google is still master of the search domain, but that hasn’t stopped the company from looking over its shoulder. The latest survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 83% of American Internet users say they use Google as their primary search engine, vastly more than any other individual search engine. Yet despite this, Google is constantly implementing changes to its model, most recently in its efforts to increase its semantic search capabilities and its attempts to provide more direct answers to user queries rather than the standard list of websites.”

Reed interviewed Gartner analyst Whit Andrews who told Reed, “Google will always feel competitive pressure. Bing seems to have woken Google up a little bit. Google is right to worry about competitive pressures from other search engines because there is no operational cost from switching from one search engine to another. At the same time, Google also has some advantages that you can’t eliminate. If you’re using Google, you’re one of a billion people using it, which means they have lots of data to help them determine the best results. Google has to take advantage of that in order to continue to grow their business. So that’s their biggest challenge. Google is aware that switching costs are not large, so they better stay paranoid and they’ve done very well at staying paranoid.”

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Image: Courtesy Google