This morning’s Wall Street Journal reports on Google’s gradual incorporation of semantic search techniques, in an article titled “Google Gives Search a Refresh” by Amir Efrati. Since WSJ is a subscriber-site, that link may or may not work for you. The article also appears in the print version on page B1. And, of course, you can find it on Factiva.

From the article: “Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive, said in a recent interview that the search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another, such as a company (Google) with its founders (Sergey Brin and Larry Page).”

I’m sure we’ll hear more about this at WebSearch University in September, because by that time we’ll probably have real world examples of how Google’s “refresh” is actually working.