Yahoo makes semantic search shift

Of general interest, this article appeared here, on Friday:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7296056.stm

I googled on "Yahoo makes semantic search shift" and got over 12,000 hits.

(Apologies if this has already come around to everyone, but I doubt if that's 
the case.)

- David Martin


*Yahoo makes semantic search shift *

Yahoo's move could help it compete with arch-rival Google

*Yahoo has announced its adoption of some of the key standards of the
"semantic web".*

The technology is widely seen as the next step for the world wide web
and it involves a much richer understanding of the masses of data placed
online.

The company said it would start to include some semantic web identifiers
when indexing the web for Yahoo search.

The move could mean a big boost for semantic web technologies which have
struggled to win a big audience.

*Better results*

At the moment most search engines, particularly Google, identify
relevance for a particular topic using the interconnections between
sites as much as they do the text on any single page.

The semantic web promises to change this because it helps to capture the
meaning of data on a page and so give machines classifying or searching
the web the capability to work out its relevance to a particular topic.

In an entry on Yahoo's blog, Amit Kumar, director of product management
for the company's search site, said it was now starting to back key
semantic web standards.

Mr Kumar said despite "remarkable progress" being made on how to
classify meaning on webpages, the benefits of this work have not been
felt by the average web user.

What was lacking, he added, was a compelling reason or "killer app" to
use the semantic web technology.

"We believe that app can be web search," he wrote.

Professor Stefan Decker, a director of the Digital Enterprise Research
Institute at the National University of Ireland and a member of the
scientific council of the Web Science Research Initiative, said Yahoo
had recognised that the semantic web was catching on.

Google's New York offices, AP
The semantic web could mean a challenge for Google

Like the early days of the web, he said, many people were now tagging
data with the labels and identifiers demanded by semantic web technology.

These tags are similar in concept to the familiar HTML labels that help
format text and other data on webpages.

Yahoo had realised that there was now enough to index to back up their
search engine.

In a similar vein by starting to include the tags and descriptors
defined by semantic web standards into its search index, web users
suddenly have better reasons to use them.

Dr Decker said the advent of the semantic web promised to make a search
much more productive.

Instead of returning a long list of links, a semantic web search engine
would be able to understand what type of object, such as a person, was
being sought and aggregate information around that

Dr Decker said the promise of the semantic web had spurred visionaries
such as Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee.

Only now, he said, was the technology being put in place to fulfil that
vision.

Before now, proposing such as thing was like "trying to build a jet
plane when the world only had the technology for bicycles."

"It'll mean a quantum leap in productivity and effectiveness," he said.

Professor Wendy Hall from the School of Electronics and Computer Science
at the University of Southampton and a director of the Web Research
Science Initiative, said, "With the semantic web we're at the place the
web was in 1992."

She added that the move to the semantic web could pose challenges for
established companies such as Google which have grown on the back of
indexing documents rather than objects.

Received on Monday, 17 March 2008 20:11:15 UTC