March 14th, 2008 Posted in SEO
Yahoo is making a shift in the way it conducts its searches placing far more emphasis upon the semantic elements of websites. Referred to as the ‘semantic web’ it is widely believed to be the future of the internet. The technology involves an increased qualitative focus for searches placing greater emphasis on understanding the huge amount of information present on the World Wide Web.
Yahoo has stated that they will begin to include ‘semantic web identifiers’ in the indexing of websites, boosting a somewhat flagging semantic web industry that has failed to gain popularity. Currently Google, the world’s most popular search engine, uses a system of link popularity as much as page content to determine relevance. Semantic web is set to change this by focussing more upon the meaning of a webpage and hence producing more relevant results for searchers.
Yahoo is taking this step as the technology is becoming increasingly developed to provide more useful search results. Unfortunately the new technology has not been available to the average web user and Yahoo is setting out to change this. It has been argued that it will only take a little time of including semantic information on websites for the technology to become widely used.
It is hoped that websites will become much more specific and hence searches will have greater levels of relevance. The technology will ultimately create the situation where instead of searching for a generic term like laptops, the searcher will be able to enter ‘laptops with a 14.1 inch screen, with so and so processor for under £300’. The results returned will not be generic list of sites selling laptops but only the pages that match the specific search criteria. The move by Yahoo can be seen as another strategy to widen its accessibility to developers and programmers in an attempt to catch up with Google.
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