What is a semantic search engine?
A semantic search engine means many things to many people. In our context, a semantic search engine is one that “understands” the meaning of data and information it crawls. For example, a semantic search engine that crawls a recipe site should understand that “183” is the number of calories associated with the current recipe, so that it can then make use of this information in its index, user interface and query language. Recently, Yahoo has announced its search engine crawler, Slurp, will soon start “understanding” content embedded in sites in formats such as RDFa, eRDF and the various microformats standards. This announcment is a first step towards reaching a truly semantic search engine. One hurdle that still remains is the fact that Yahoo’s engine still relies on the efforts of site owners and publishers to transform their site. In order to help publishers make their site “semantic readable” we have built the Semantify service.
