Yahoo to change the way it indexes sites
by Alan Harten
Google rival Yahoo has announced its intention to adopt, in part, key standards of the “semantic web”. This new technology is generally considered to be the next step forward for the now ageing, world wide web.
Yahoo stated that it will soon be including semantic web identifiers when the search engine indexes the web. This is seen as a massive boost for semantic web advocates, and their technologies which have been sidelined.
The way Google and most search engines function at the moment is to search for relevance of a specific topic, by studying connections between sites, as well as text on any individual page.
This new system, intends to approach the problem differently, as it looks for the actual meaning of any data on a page. This should enable the software searching the World Wide Web, the ability to figure out the sites relevance to a specific topic.
On the company blog, director of product management, Amit Kumar said that Yahoo, believe in key semantic web standards. And went on to say “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.”
This new technology could possibly make a real challenge to Google’s dominance of search on the web. Sites are beginning to tag data with identifiers needed to function with semantic web technology.
The tags are reasonably similar to HTML labels currently being used for formatting text on websites. Yahoo believes that enough of the new tags have been added to make it viable for them to index using the new technology for their search engine.
They also will believe that by beginning to index these pages, they will get around the ‘chicken and egg’ problem. By encouraging, far more sites to start this type of tagging to boost their Yahoo search position.
The major difference between this and the current search standard is that the new system should be capable of understanding what type of information is actually being searched for.
Yahoo believe that this new technology will be a massive leap forward and “It’ll mean a quantum leap in productivity and effectiveness,”
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It’s “Indexes”,
“Index’s” would be a possessive apostrophe indicating something belonged to an entity named Index, would it not?
Comment by John — March 17, 2008 @ 10:23 am
Great.
Now get rid of the intrusive and irritating advertising and I may consider using it.
Comment by William — March 17, 2008 @ 10:26 am
Good point on index’s - title edited. :)
Comment by Brian Turner — March 17, 2008 @ 10:42 am
Yeah its true as i have predicted 2009 will be a year for Yahoo! though i m a Google lover :)
It would be great to see yahoo rocking with its new technology.
How far the semantic technology gona work we have to see the real game to be played by Yahoo.
Keep the good work i really love Yahoo!s new approach.
Competition must go on,,,,,,,,,
Comment by Pravish Thomas — March 17, 2008 @ 12:12 pm