Semantic Monkey

I’m excited to be able to confirm that I’ll be speaking at SES Toronto on June 8th. It’s been a few years since I worked a booth at an SES event back in my Mirago days and I’m looking forward to see how much things have changed.

I’ll be part of a panel discussing ‘Universal and Blended Search: Comprehensive Visibility Challenges’ along side Anne Kennedy (Beyond Ink), Bill Tighe (Google), and Jed Schneiderman (Microsoft).

Obviously with the timing so close to the scheduled launch of Bing I’m expecting a storm of questions for Jed about their new approach to highly dynamic federation. Also with both Yahoo! and Google on the stage attendees will get to really understand the benefits of (and increasingly easy ways of incorporating) structured data to visibly impact their representation on the SRP.

Track: Nuts & Bolts
Universal and Blended Search: Comprehensive Visibility Challenges
Search result multiplicity is not a new phenomenon, but recent advancements guarantee that the world of search and marketing will be changing forever. How do the new “blended” search results pages affect your marketing strategy? Do these changes mean that the major search engines are eager to keep the “second click” on web properties owned by themselves? How popular are the new blended search results with users? This session will include research data available only at SES.

Moderator:
Mike Grehan, SES Advisory Board & Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media

Speakers:
Anne Kennedy, SES Advisory Board & Managing Partner and Founder, Beyond Ink
Bill Tighe, Agency Business Development AE, Google Canada
Nick Cox, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo!
Jed Schneiderman, Online Marketing Lead, Consumer & Online, Microsoft Canada

As I highlighted a few short weeks ago, Google has been dropping hints about the Semantic Web so subtle that even us chaps realised something exciting was going on over at the Googleplex. During the Searchology conference (their annual slap in the face to startups who dared think they were on to something unique and exciting) Big G revealed that the Christmastime rumors of data islands were no more and that RDFa was accepted!

The announcement focuses on hCard and hReview, which if found on your page be will be turned in to a visual presentation and added to your result on their SRP. Sound familiar? If it does that’s because, as many bloggers pointed out, it’s incredibly similar to Yahoo! SearchMonkey Structured Objects. Competition aside, this is great news for publishers as it is yet another vindication of the benefits of structured data on your pages.

Google Rich Snippets

Yahoo! SearchMonkey

Where SearchMonkey has focused on complete Objects for presentation - e.g. a Video looks like this whilst a News article looks like that - Rich Snippets, as Google is calling this, call out single key/value pairs which can add value to a standard result. So far however their presentation appears to be behind flood controls as you need to add your domain to a waiting list. My hunch is that Google is treading carefully due to concerns as much about spam as the resulting visual impact on their end users.

Now that the top two engines are adopting public, open-standards we can expect to increasingly enjoy the benefits of ever richer, more accurate results with highly targeted presentations.

It’s been all quiet on the Semantic front over at Google until a flurry of recent press murmurings. Something’s definitely changed over at the Googolplex, but so far it appears to be just their PR department!

A pretty good article over at PCW discusses some of these recent announcements, but in short it appears that Semantic Search holds a different meaning for Google than everyone else… with the possible exception of your favourite dictionary. Semantic simply means ‘the meaning of language’ or ‘the relationship between symbols’. If we assume words and phrases are symbols, then Google is certainly pursuing Semantic Search. Their visible focus of late has been to provide links to related topics and longer summaries, both of which have been available at the competition for a very long time. Nothing new so far.

Rumours in December leaked hinting at some early work to create data-islands within the pages of a number of top publishers - a new form of non standard markup which could lead to new presentations in the Google SRP. So far, there’s been little sign of this progressing which is a tremendous relief, and not just because I head up the SearchMonkey program over at Y! where we’ve already launched an open approach to this.  I truly believe in the power of utilising metadata for Search. Seeing our competitors follow suit at this stage is more of a vindication than a troubling development, but any attempt to force the market to use non-standard markup is not a good sign for the web at large.

Have you started to see signs of other Semantic Search developments on the web? What do you think of them so far, and do you think open standards are of any importance at this time?