A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a story titled Google Gives Search a Refresh. Considering that it talks about the dominant search engine in the world doing an overhaul of its system, the story picked up pace in no time and spread like wildfire.

The article talked about Google’s push of semantic search into its algorithm where in the search engine will try to directly answer a user’s query first before showing it a list of results from around the web. Here’s a quick quote from the story:

Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page.

Now, our readers would agree that Google kinda does that already. And this is what Danny Sullivan argued in his lengthy rebuttal to WSJ’s post. He mentioned Google products like Google Squared which continue to survive and Google’s current direct answer capabilities, and went on to say that this is nothing but a PR play by Google to restore user confidence in its brand which has been dented by some of the recent events, or I should say recent product introductions.

Sarah Perez over at TechCrunch agrees with Sullivan that Google wants to shift attention from the negative publicity it got (and continues to get) from stuff like Search Plus Your World, and Google Search is always changing so this isn’t a very big news.

Business Insider says Google thinks Bing is right and hence it’s taking this route.

So, what do you think? Is this announcement of “big change” just a PR play like most of the tech community thinks, or is there more than meets the eye?