I find this a bit odd

[tigermann]

I find this a bit odd -

http://www.freelegal.co.uk/whiplash-injury.htm is No 1 for
whiplash injuries

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=whi...-8&hl=en&meta=

Although all anchor text links, Title, H1 headings and url, say whiplash injury, it is ranked for whiplash injuries .... the page is invisible when searched for whiplash injury!

Maybe ..... whiplash injury is a lot more competitive?

[Johan007]

oh yeah well found!

Injury and injuries is treated as the same word cos its shown up in the results as bold! (stemming?)... BUT it only works with the word "whiplash".

[John Scott]

Google's been doing that for a while now with several keywords. The search for "webmaster forum" gives the same results as a search for "webmaster forums".

[Grumpus]

Hiya Gang,

Actually, this is a good example of Google's Applied Semantics Technology in action. The article I linked to describes "Stemming" as a separate function, but the way stemming is working in Google, it appears (to me anyway) that it's not really stemming, but rather a side effect of the semantics engine.

Bear in mind that this whole thing is pretty new to Google and, as such, the quality and effectiveness of it is a bit questionable sometimes. You can be pretty sure that they're hard at work improving it though.

For those of you who are more advanced in your understanding of how SEO works, here's a paper on the concepts of "The Semantic Web". It's not an easy read, by any stretch and for most, it'll probably be over your head. In a nutshell, Semantics is a means of analyzing the relationships between words and phrases as they appear in natural language. It's a way of determining that when I type "Paris Hilton rates" I'm looking for information about a hotel in France and if I type "Paris Hilton tapes" I'm looking for naked pictures of the hot blonde from that FOX TV show.

Let's look at those terms, now.

In this case, Google has decided that people who type "whiplash injury" are looking for something different than those who type in "whiplash injuries". Both sets of results contain similar pages (and many of the same pages), but they are weighted somewhat differently.

The "injury" set of listings is giving me more results that answer the statement "I have a whiplash injury". There are more "informational" and "health" related sites in this set.

The "injuries" set of listings addresses this statement: "I need someone who specializes in whiplash injuries." This list is showing more "legal" and "commercial" type sites.

So, in this example, we can see that Google has determined (through natural occurances of the terms throughout the web) that "whiplash injury" is more personal (it's about me, I need help with my whiplash injury) and that "whiplash injuries" is more compensational (it's about who specializes in dealing with whiplash injuries.)

As I said, you'll still see opposite examples across the two terms, but the results are definitely skewed toward each general "meaning" that I've outlined. I make no claims about whether Google has come to the proper conclusions, here, I'm just showing you the conclusions they've come to with their fancy new toy from Applied Semantics.

G.

[tigermann]

Google's been doing that for a while now with several keywords. The search for "webmaster forum" gives the same results as a search for "webmaster forums".

If it's the same results I would understand .... but I optimised for whiplash injury but cannot be found in the top 20 for this keyword but got to No 1 for whiplash injuries instead!

[tigermann]

It's a way of determining that when I type "Paris Hilton rates" I'm looking for information about a hotel in France and if I type "Paris Hilton tapes" I'm looking for naked pictures of the hot blonde from that FOX TV show.

Well whatever your search objecvtives were - it seems more fun to be presented with the latter!

[I, Brian]

Good call, Grumpus - this certainly was showing vividly straight after Florida.

A particularly strange issue I reported is how the order in which you typed in keywords would significantly change the returned SERPs.

I didn't really know anything about Applied Semantics then (heck, I've only just started using Adsense even), and although I suspected that Applied Semantics may be being applied now, you seem to have identified a particularly strong cause and effect issue with clarity.

The overall effect seems much lessened now - but it remains to be seen if Google doesn't turn it back up in future updates. It also makes the issue of relevant backlinks (ie, themes) even more of a pressing issue in SEO now.

Does anybody remember back when Florida first impacted, and Googleguy mentioned in WebMasterworld how there was a second upgrade to the algo about to be implemented? If Applied Semantics was one, then what was the other? Can Applied Semantics account for an "expert system" in it's own right, or is the second factor more likely related to the implementation of something such as Hilltop or TopicSensitive PageRank? Either way, Florida is through a glass less darkly.