Over on one of their official blogs, Google just released the details about a major change to search engine results. They’ve named this update “Knowledge Graph”, but it’s actually just the evolution & expansion of search technology that’s already been in place on Google for some time.
The objective is pretty simple, to give users direct answers on the search results page, rather than just linking to pages that might have the answers. If you’ve searched for something like a simple calculation or a unit conversion recently, you’ve seen something like this.
In my opinion, this is an obvious evolution for Google. They constantly endeavor to make web search smarter, and this is a major step in that direction. With traditional searches, the webpage that rules the day is the one that’s considered most relevant to the subject being searched – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the webpage with the answer you’re looking for, or even that the content is accurate – just that it’s relevant. This next step (often called “semantic search”) is designed to organize information to give Googlers the information that they’re looking for directly from the search results page.
Of course, there are obvious implications for SEO. If you’re the owner of the website that had the most detailed breakdown of unit conversions, you’ll likely suffer from a drop in traffic. Searchers don’t need to click through anymore – they got their answer from Google directly.
“Knowledge Graph” is a big deal, and it makes it even more important than ever to have a comprehensive search engine marketing strategy.