Google has given its Web search engine an injection of semantic technology to identify associations and concepts related to a query, improving the list of related search terms Google displays along with its results, instead of simply analyzing keywords without understanding their meaning.

“For example, if you search for ‘principles of physics,’ our algorithms understand that ‘angular momentum,’ ‘special relativity,’ ‘big bang’ and ‘quantum mechanic’ are related terms that could help you find what you need,” Google engineers said.

Google also introduced longer “snippets,” the text excerpts Google extracts from Web sites to show in search results where the query keywords appear.