Next Generation Search Engines

Yahoo! announced not long ago the release of the new Yahoo!Search open platform. This is an important step for Yahoo!, which joins this way the search engines’ movement towards the semantic web.

Google has been using latent semantic indexing for a couple of years already and this in my opinion makes Google the first search engine that got close to the semantic indexing , followed by hakia and powerset that both try creating artificial intelligence. So far they are only being artificial.

The way the search engines index websites should not be confused for the way they rank websites. Google is still depending on interrelations between sites to display its search results.

hakia, although( according to many) more advanced from a search technology point of view, doesn’t have enough sites in its index to compete with Google.

Powerset on the other hand searches now Wikipedia articles. For all other features of this promising new search engine, you’ll need a user manual… unless you are a proud member of Powerlabs.

Yahoo! oscillates between excellence and disappointment and the new approach to search could be the move that saves the day. Yahoo!Search is the first search engines that gets close to what W3C defines as the semantic web.

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

A search for a restaurant in New York for example will display results which are far more relevant than Google’s.

The situation has a logical explanation though: all first results in Yahoo!Search are based on data collected from Yahoo!Local and on ratings that come from Yahoo! users. Obviously Yahoo! already achieved what other search engines are struggling to accomplish: Yahoo!Search is a human powered search engine. The beauty of the achievement is that Yahoo! never made a big fuss about its plans. Somehow the second most important search engine on the web always kept its plans in the shadows.

Of course, the image examples above are not relevant for what semantic search actually means, but Yahoo!’s results come pretty close already. Yahoo! has greater plans than just indexing HTML: it aims to index objects.

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

Basically, Yahoo! aims to engage site owners into creating the world’s first open search engine, by providing (submitting) relevant content to Yahoo! The search results will then look like:

Impacts on SEO

Those who created their websites respecting the W3C web standards as much as possible will find the new Yahoo!Search open platform a welcome change. Personally I’ve been expecting such an evolution in search for more than three years already.

Site optimization for the search should now focus on creating harmony between text, images, video, sound and other objects. All these objects will need to be tagged properly to insure relevancy for the searchers. As the new search algorithms will also include user ratings developing a site with the visitors in mind is paramount: accessibility and usability remain parts of the equation, but to these we’ll also add content harmony and relevancy, user ratings (user trust) and a cluster of new algorithms that will no longer depend solely on the search engine bots but also on information provided by the site owners to the search engines (now particularly to Yahoo!Search):

Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites — ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data — directly on the Yahoo! Search results page. - source.

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