New Google Search Capability

Google apparently has started heavily providing semantic searching. In a semantic search, a computer must understand how to put information into various contexts to answer questions. And Google is now doing a lot more of that has been apparent before. For example, the link above shows a search for "what is the captial city of oregon?" and the answer:

Now, if you searched for the terms "capital" and "oregon", you'd come up with Salem. What's noteable here, and suggestive of future power, is that the information is framed in such a way as to explicitly answer your question.

This doesn't work regardless of your syntax. I tried the search phrase "what is the capital of oregon?" and got some very different search results. So clearly you have to include enough information in the query so Google can "understand" the type sof relationships you're looking for. But this could be useful.