The semantic web was one of those ideas that are always a little out of reach; statements of “that’s so cool!” emerged from few places other than tech conferences. Yahoo has announced its support for semantic web standards, however, so it looks like the thing may finally arrive.
Amit Kumar And Semantic Content
“Without a killer semantic web app for consumers, site owners have been reluctant to support standards like RDF, or even microformats,” wrote Yahoo’s own Amit Kumar on the corporate blog. He then made the important declaration: “We believe that app can be web search.”
More information should be shared over the next few weeks, but Kumar went ahead and named certain microformats and vocabulary components that will be supported. We’re sure this is causing a lot of movement in certain circles; Google may have a massive market share, but site owners will rush to accommodate Yahoo just the same.
Also, that’s assuming Google doesn’t follow suit, which it quite possibly will. Executives in Mountain View won’t want to miss out on the positive press, and although word of this development will take some time to travel, they won’t want to risk losing the average user, either.
Yahoo’s support of semantic web standards should allow it to offer much smarter search results. While there is a decided “cool” factor, then, this seems like an intelligent business move, as well.
