There are a number of articles that are talking about the Google Refresh of the search engine and how they are planning on moving you as fast as possible from Thought to Answer...
One of the problems of course is that a user's time on Google's site is mere seconds compared to hours people are spending on Facebook or other media.
Here-in lies the rub. How do you get people to spend more time looking at answers on Google instead of clicking those little blue links that take you away from their site... and how does this effect your SERPs work to gain high SEO on a search result.
Symantic Search is Google's answer. From a blog post by Amit Singhal https://plus.google.com/115744399689614835150/posts/3vLRVL7C4QS
"Let me just say that every day, we're improving our ability to give you the best answers to your questions as quickly as possible"
But the true answer is... "how do we keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paris"
Slowly over time, you will see where Google will start providing complete answers for example hotels or for air fares or in other cases "shopping". This approach keeps people exploring data on the Google site and keeps them from clicking away on those little blue links... at least until they can charge someone for it.
Other articles that may be important here are ones regarding how your PPC Adwords program may be affected and realizing that Universal Search is triggered only when Google feels there is a good reason to present other media types which can totally change the search results order you were expecting from your keyword analysis.
Read this short article Kevin Lee | March 30, 2012
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2164410/goodbye-keywords-google-semantic
Bottom line is that your keyword search engine tools are now less effective in telling you exactly what will be presented in various parts of the world and on what devices will the search be conducted ( we are seeing 30% of our searches coming from mobile devices right now).
