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saved by7 people, first byMaggie Tsai on 2008-03-13, last byStefan Melles on 2008-06-17

  • TechCrunch and Search Engine Land are reporting this morning that Yahoo! will now be indexing Semantic Web and Microformats markup from around the web and will use that information to display more structured search results.

  • What Does This Mean?



    Here's one example of what that could mean: Today, a web service might work very hard to scour the internet to discover all the book reviews written on various sites, by friends of mine, who live in Europe. That would be so hard that no one would probably try it. The suite of technologies Yahoo! is moving to support will make such searches trivial. Once publishers start including things like hReview, FOAF and geoRSS in their content then Yahoo!, and other sites leveraging Yahoo! search results, will be able to ask easily what it is we want to do with those book reviews. Say hello to a new level of innovation.

  • The basic idea behind Semantic Web technology is that by signaling what kind of content you are publishing on an item-by-item or field-by-field basis, publishers can help make the meaning of their text readable by machines. If machines are able to determine the meaning of the content on a page, then our human brains don't have to waste time determining, for example, which search results go beyond containing our keywords and actually mean what we are looking for.

  • Semantic markup is like a content-level site map, something all the search engines have agreed on a standard for already. Semantic web technology is next. There will be big job opportunities, more than there are for SEO in the short term, for people who can help publishers implement Semantic Web markup retroactively and into the future.



    The Semantic Web was one of a handful of topics that we identified as key themes for the coming year in our RWW Toolkit for 2008. Check that toolkit out for resources you can use to follow this important topic as it unfolds.

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