Yahoo Empowering Semantic Web Programmers

Yahoo announced that it will soon provide APIs to its Search platform to allow third-party developers to alter search results with structured data to make it more useful for Web users. The program will enable developers to overlay their own algorithms to determine how the Yahoo Search index is used. Yahoo is also supporting several semantic Web standards, including RDF, and microformats to make programming on Yahoo's search platform easier, says Yahoo's Amit Kumar. Programmers have been slow to support standards and write software for the semantic Web, in part because it lacks a killer application, Kumar says. He says Web search is the missing killer app. Instead of independently developed semantic silos scattered across the Web, Yahoo aims to bring all the semantic information together once it is available. For example, Kumar says that marking up profile pages with microformats will allow Yahoo Search to better understand the semantic content and the relationships of its site's components. "If I can put an algorithm on top of search that says here are all of the things I want the algorithm to prioritize and here's all of the things I want it to exclude that's really powerful," says IDC analyst Rachel Happe. Read More