Yahoo finds new weapon in war against Google

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 14 Mar 2008 at 09:47

Yahoo is bolstering its search engine with support for semantic web standards.

Semantic web standards such as Microformats help search engines make the connections between different pieces of information on a website, allowing it to pull up more relevant results.

For example, when searching for a person the inclusion of Microformats would also bring up pertinent information on their current location, job and contacts through their LinkedIn profile.

"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 sites," says Amit Kumar, director of product management for Yahoo Search, on the company's blog.

Yahoo says its support for semantic web standards could lead to a "much richer search experience" especially if its announcement encourages more sites to adopt the standard.

"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," Kumar writes.

"Without a killer semantic web app for consumers, site owners have been reluctant to support standards like Microformats. We believe that app can be web search."