Yahoo! Search Blog: The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem

Big news today aside form the Bebo acquisition – Yahoo released more details about its Open Search Platform.

I think this is a move that has some promise. At Spark, we are big believers that openness is a big deal and will allow for increasing innovation in our areas of focus.

I have to disagree with one line from Yahoo’s press release, however:

“While there has been remarkable progress made toward understanding the semantics of web content, the benefits of a data web have not reached the mainstream consumer.”

The problem with this is that consumers are interacting with the semantic web already. You can too:

1. Go to the New York Sun (you could try CNN.com, or Washington Post as well, but this is more obvious in the NY Sun)

2. Click on any article

3. You will see that a bunch of important concepts of the article hyperlinked. Click on an article.

4. You will see a landing page with dynamic content about this topic from the New York Sun, other major publications, and the broader web.  Browse through, read some blogs and watch some videos, explore.

Congratulations, you have just experienced a piece of the Semantic Web.

Those editorial quality hyperlinks were not generated by humans, but algorithmically created. The related articles weren’t selected based on keyword matches, but based on a semantic understanding of the relatedness between your first article and all the other content on the web.

This example is powered by Inform Technologies, one of Spark’s portfolio companies. But there are other companies out there utilizing some of the core standards of the semantic web to deliver real value to users. The Semantic Web will be the core of search in the future, but search is not going to be the only, or the first important killer app.