Hummingbird: The First Step
Posted: Sun Feb 16, 2025 4:27 am
Semantics is nothing more than the study of the meaning of words. Put like that, it almost sounds philosophical, doesn't it? Actually, it is, more or less.
It was thanks to Ferdinand de Sausurre that it gained the status of... Science! Really. With laboratory, tests and experiments.
Sausurre explained several things: syntagm, paradigm, signifier, meaning. This science is still relevant — especially for Google — because it explains how people's discourse is constructed before they speak.
By the early 20th century, we already knew that sentences like "I bought a new sofa couch" mad lawyer data e no linguistic sense whatsoever.
We have a natural semantic field in our heads. Humans know that the formation "new sofa" is meaningless if the complement is "sofa" again.
You can complement the phrase "I bought a new sofa" with "yesterday", "in that store" or even "very ugly". All of these are natural and make sense.
That is to say: there is an organic way of communicating, and that is also semantics.
The famous Google update in 2013 inserted into the search engine everything that we and Saussure already knew.
Keywords are still important, of course. But there is no point in stuffing content with them. Google has understood that nobody speaks like that in real life.
It was thanks to Ferdinand de Sausurre that it gained the status of... Science! Really. With laboratory, tests and experiments.
Sausurre explained several things: syntagm, paradigm, signifier, meaning. This science is still relevant — especially for Google — because it explains how people's discourse is constructed before they speak.
By the early 20th century, we already knew that sentences like "I bought a new sofa couch" mad lawyer data e no linguistic sense whatsoever.
We have a natural semantic field in our heads. Humans know that the formation "new sofa" is meaningless if the complement is "sofa" again.
You can complement the phrase "I bought a new sofa" with "yesterday", "in that store" or even "very ugly". All of these are natural and make sense.
That is to say: there is an organic way of communicating, and that is also semantics.
The famous Google update in 2013 inserted into the search engine everything that we and Saussure already knew.
Keywords are still important, of course. But there is no point in stuffing content with them. Google has understood that nobody speaks like that in real life.