Internet Search Takes a Semantic Turn
Despite this success, keyword search has many limits caused by its inability to process the meaning of queries and Web pages. Because of potential confusion over the meaning of words, traditional searches generally return large numbers of pages, including many irrelevant to a query. Furthermore, keyword-based approaches let search-optimization techniques artificially make hackers’ or other irrelevant pages rise to the top of search results.
Semantic search would solve many of these problems, said Kathleen Dahlgren, chief technology officer of Cognition Technologies, a vendor of semantic-based text-processing technology. Semantic-search tools use document tags and topic-based indexes of material to create a model that represents what various pieces of content mean. This lets a search engine more precisely respond to a query by disambiguating the multiple meanings of words in a document and determining how they relate to one another within a sentence. Semantic search could be the Semantic Web’s killer app, said Peter Mika, a researcher and data architect at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona.
Read the full article at Computing Now.