** Continued From: Searching With Semantics! - Part #1
In part one of Searching with Semantics! I illustrated the sad state of the modern day web search. I explained how it is virtually hopeless for a surfer to find exactly what they are looking for through an SE search.
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"Some webmasters care more about their SE position than they do about the quality of their sites. Why shouldn't they? If surfers can't find you, who cares about your fabulous content?" |
Currently the average search engine provider uses a word-based algorithm to find search results. The surfer types in a keyword or search term and the SE looks for those exact words posted in the body, title and meta tags of the HTML documents indexed within its database. The engine then returns the results of that search to the user as a link list, with the most relevant pages listed at the top.
Because of this type of text-based search, content is less import than keyword optimization when it comes to placement at the top of the list. Some webmasters care more about their SE position than they do about the quality of their sites. Why shouldn’t they? If surfers can’t find you, who cares about your fabulous content?
The result of all this keyword mania is that the typical surfer and the typical webmaster are losing each other to paid-portal links and advertisements. Studies have shown that most surfers make a maximum of two attempts to search through an SE for something. They rarely look beyond the first-page results and they limit their search terms to no more than two words. An adult webmaster has to be an SEO god to climb to the top of those odds.
Fortunately the future holds a better technology for searching the Internet. It’s called the Semantic Web.
Semantics is the study of meanings. The Semantic Web looks for the meaning in a search. Present-day SEs scan pages for the presence of the actual keywords used in a search session. The Semantic web looks deeper for a relationship between the keywords used. The Semantic web uses a language based on Ontology (The OWL Web Ontology Language). Ontology is a science that studies the relationships between entities. The Semantic Web is the brainchild of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the father of the web, Tim Berners-Lee.
To explain further, in a Semantic search the engine will look for Metadata. Metadata is literally defined as "data about data". The Metadata of an HTML page will uncover information about the page such as its creation date, the author name, site map, content rating and categorization information. The Semantic search will act as an intelligent agent, sharing much more than any text-based search.
At this time, there are hundreds of websites that offer a kind of Semantic search (Faceted Metadata) to their visitors. There are travel sites, auction sites, hardware bargain searches, all of them featuring Metadata search capabilities.
A prime illustration of a Metadata search feature would be the one at Amazon.com. If you’ve ever performed a title search for a book at Amazon you’ve noticed that your results page is usually chock full of all kinds of bonus info concerning your query. Not only do you get relative title links, you get links that list an author’s other works. You are presented with links to user reviews and to titles, that share a common subject matter with the content of your original book. You’re shown whether the book is in print, its original publication date and publisher. If a book is popular enough, you could literally spend an hour or two just reading all the commentary and data that comes from an Amazon.com Metadata search.
Now imagine if you could search the entire World Wide Web that way. That’s the mission of the Semantic Web.
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Keep imagining that you’ll not only get all this killer info from a single-click search, you’ll also be able to save that info to your appropriate personal software with a simple click as well. Add contact info to your Outlook. Save images in a preset folder. Enter important dates to your calendar. Take your imagination just a wee step further and see the future of the Semantic web as it applies to your work as an adult webmaster.
Find content faster. Locate a site or business owner instantly. Study the information you’ll find covering your own sites. Learn where a sponsor is located. Get to the root of some real info on those obscure referrers in your log files. Who knows? Maybe the Semantic web will help simplify the records-keeping minutia problem with the new 2257 regulations!
The Semantic Web is here and will continue to grow. The sooner you become familiar with how it works, the sooner you can use it to your adult Internet advantage.
To learn all about the Semantic Web project, visit the World Wide Web Consortium page at:
To get a better idea of the experience of a Semantic search you might want to play around at Amazon’s new search engine A9. I advise you visit the lite version of A9 at:
You’ll soon discover that you can perform five different types of searches at the same time: image, movie, web, books and reference. Go for the full A9/Toolbar combo and you’ll be able to write/save notes about a certain page as well as store bookmarks online. Technically, A9 is more of a Faceted Metadata search than it is a true Semantic search but it’s a decent facsimile of how the whole thing works.
A web search with meaning. Won’t that be wonderful?