Reports by Wall Street Journal and other news sources claim Google will be implementing a major overhaul to the Google Search Engine.
Google wants to make a more "semantic search" experience for its users. Google plans to build formulas that will better understand the meanings of words. For instance, it will better differentiate Tide the laundry detergent and tide the ocean current term. The Google team plans to roll this program out within the next few months.
Part of this overhaul is meant to be more fact and answer driven than Google is presently. Google tends to only supply links relating to the search inquiry, but plans to more often answer the question directly rather than navigating the user to the supplied links. This has some skeptical that Google actually is overhauling the search engine at all because right now Google already directly answers things like flight times, math equations, and stock prices. Google claims to have these direct answers more readily available with the overhaul.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Google's new overhaul will affect 10-20% of the total search inquiries. This results in multiple billions of search results. The goal of this reload of sorts is to ultimately make users spend more time on Google. Rather than being sent to outside sites via link, Google's direct results will keep users staying put on their site, in turn giving Google the ability to jack up advertising prices.
With all of these changes bound to occur, Google will still keep many of its prominent features such as 
keyword search and Search + Your World, which incorporates Google search into its social network, Google+.
Search Executive, Amit Singhal, coins the changes as Google's attempt to be closer to "how humans understand the world." Singhal also goes on to say about the new search efforts, "better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of entities' - people, places, and things - which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years." This of course is great for Google's bottom line since not only will users spend more time on the site with direct results but ad revenue will also increase due to a bigger database, thus more pages creating more ad space.
To each their own in deciding whether Google is talking about their overhaul as a PR stunt, since they already do many of these features, or if Google really plans on creating the next generation in search. In my opinion, Google will in fact innovate completely to be on the forefront of search in the future.