Yahoo! has announced its support of semantic web standards to improve search relevancy and user experience.
The move will hopefully encourage more Web site design firms to adopt the W3C guidelines for standardizing website design.
Search engines, including Google, use the links between different web pages to determine a pages’ relevance for a search query. The Yahoo! semantic web model would make connections between the initial query to everything on the Internet related to it.
For example, if a user searches for the actor Tom Cruise, Yahoo!‘s semantic search results will pull information from different online resources on everything related to the initial search. So the user would get results that could include a Tom Cruise biography, specific movies, movie reviews, perhaps Tom Cruise movies to rent on Netflix, Scientology, Nicole Kidman, Katie Holmes, etc., etc., etc. The relevancy of the search topic has been improved and the “bigger picture” revealed.
The problem with existing search technology is that it’s unable to “read” much of the information currently on the Web, including images without tags, graphics, video etc. that may be relevant to the initial search. The challenge faced by Yahoo! is finding a way of helping machines find and index that information, thus giving the searcher the best, most relevant, comprehensive results possible on different media. Welcome to Web 3.0!
Written by Julia Hyde
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