It's coming and it's coming soon. Within the next few months, Google will launch 'semantic search', which, unlike simple page ranking, will now attempt to pull useful facts and figures from web-sites and store them in a database, much in the same way that Microsoft's Bing search engine is supposed to be able to extract useful data though a similar approach.
To place this new feature into context, semantic search doesn't necessarily equate to a bunch of figures being displayed in the search results and is more subtle; for example, asking for an actor's age would return results highlighting both the relevant keywords as well as the actual answer to the question, the age itself, with pages containing the answer and not just the search terms likely to receive a bump in the rankings.
Google has already been building its semantic database for two years now and began with a head start, with the purchase of Metaweb Technologies back in 2010, which held 12 million database entries relating to movies, books, companies and celebrities. Google has in fact, as pictured above, already placed some semantic search terms into its live search engine, however the number of terms is expected to expand rapidly in the near future.
Beware pages spamming keywords, your value in the eyes of Google is likely to drop once semantic search is launched!
