I met with Scott Abel this past Tuesday and we briefly spoke about semantic search. I'll admit, I've read about semantic search in the past but I wasn't very familiar with it. So I did a little more research.
Semantic search is based on objects instead of just keywords, as traditional search is today. Today's search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc) find websites that contain the keywords you entered. Now, if I typed in "horn" I will get many different results. I will get results for french horns, Cape Horn, Horn's Gaslight Bar & Restaurant on Mackinac Island, Hansen & Horn, and many other results. But I will have to sort through all of those results to find what I'm really looking for, my grade school gym teacher "Mr. Horn."
Semantic search would allow me to sort results by the type of object instead of just wether the pages included my keywords. When I type "horn" I could also include "person." So my query might be "person horn." A good semantic web search engine would also recognize that many different object types exist for the word horn and present those to me so I could easily narrow my selection.
We constantly hype about good keyword placement and strong search engine optimization but semantic web presents a different twist in search that could yield much more relevant results and get us to the information we want faster. Semantic search has a long way to go before being fully adopted but it is something to keep your eye on.
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