Search Enginuity

Amit Kumar has posted more information on Yahoo Search’s Open platform. The open platform is welcome news and a fantastic move by the Yahoo team!

I encourage you to read Amit’s post. Here is the key takeaway…

“By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo! Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site. With a richer understanding of LinkedIn’s structured data included in our index, we will be able to present users with more compelling and useful search results for their site. The benefit to LinkedIn is, of course, increased traffic quality and quantity from sites like Yahoo! Search that utilize its structured data.”

Could this be the catalyst for the semantic web movement? Publishers now have an incentive to properly markup their pages to help spiders infer meaning. Hopefully the other major search engines catch on to what Yahoo is doing. Congrats to the Yahoo Search team!

Additional Reading:

• TechCrunch: Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry
• Mashable!: Yahoo Search Monkey Reveals More Details on Developer Platform
• ZDNet / The Semantic Web: Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web?
• The Social Times: Yahoo Tries To Out Open Facebook
• Search Engine Land