Web Development Magazine

Semantic Search Engines

I read interesting article recently (btw i do not read my news, but if i did then i would probably found out that i begin each of them with the similar sentence), the article was about the future of search engines, mainly semantic search engines. I do not want to get into details here because as you know, English is not my native language and i am not sure if i could explain the whole concept clearly enough, so if you need more information on semantic search check out … correct, WikiPedia

Is Google semantic search engine? This is very common question i here, and the answer is NO, it is NOT. More over i never heard, about any researches done by Google on this subject. So Google is still keyword based search engine. This means that it is better to use only keywords in query for example “keyword1 keyword2″.

On the other hand semantic search engines prefer to be asked with normal questions we use every day for example, good query for semantic search would be: “Is keyword1 better then keyword2″. Now that you see this query it may seem more like “science fiction search engine”, but i assure you that such search engines already exist, corporations spent millions of dollars (or rather euro) on researches and in fact Yahoo already implemented some semantic web technology in their search engine. Microsoft not so long ago bought PowerSet, experts say that it is very promising search engine, but … what did Google do?

I did some research on the web and haven’t found a single piece of information that Google is working on semantic web, so either: they believe that keyword research will produce better results in the end so semantic search will be kind of niche for Yahoo and Microsoft to increase their “search engine” market share or, they do not know it exists which in fact is impossible

One funny thing that came to my mind while writing this. I remember that long time ago, like few years back Microsoft presented their prototype of semantic search engine (i do not really remember), and to present people how great it is, they did a search on: “Who is Bill Gates married to?” what was the first result? Right “Microsoft”.