This is a milestone for Yahoo - will be following the developments

Keep posting updates on this search evolution

Hi Amit,

YellowBot.com has been using microformats for quite some time and we're interested in trying this out!

Thanks
Emad

Great stuff. Keep up the good work. When we will start to see Yahoo search results such as the example?

Great to hear but remember those microformats are suited to being read by machines, not by people. It's important that humans can see when microformats/ metadata etc are embedded in content too. That's only one reason we created the Geotag Icon Project:

www.geotagicons.com

So if Yahoo! detect GeoRSS in search results, for example, then why not help human recognition by associating the result with a 'standard' icon that represents geotagged content?

Nice one Amit et al. - hopefully SIOC can join the list of RDF vocabularies - see http://www.w3.org/Submissions/2007/02

Is this connected to Peter Mika's Y! Microsearch work?

Thanks to Marcus MacInnes for pointing out the broken link; it should be http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/02/

Great Job! My take here: http://www.searchenginuity.com/a-giant-leap-for-semantic-search/

This is awesome, open search and now semantic web integration, I can see a very different/user-friendly yahoo search interface/results in near future. Keep it up.
Check out our review integration and summarization for restaurants and local businesses here. E.g we'll work on providing hreview compatible data for our our content such as ">http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/c/156/CA/San-Francisco.html"> San Francisco Restaurants

Bravo. This is an excellent development for developers and a great statement of Y's ongoing and improving committment to open source standards.

This is like five years too late for me. I had easily 15K of Dublin Core on all my pages as an experiment for many years, but, as not a single device anywhere could, would, or did read it, I began stripping it out of pages whenever I changed anything else on them.

This was *serious* Dublin Core, complete with Library of Congress subject headings. And it was provably useless at the time. How would it possibly be useful now?

Awesome. Keep it up.. The more standards out there the quicker we'd see adoption.

I'd take a look at the recent changes the blogger folks had made. Good stuff over there.

This makes our work over at Spinn3r much easier as it's easier to convince site owners to implement this stuff when there's a lot of weight behind the standard.

Brilliant. First thing I've heard out of Yahoo that could actually give GOOG some competition in search result quality. I run a vertical search site for artwork called www.searchartgalleries.com. Was wondering if Yahoo's image search would also support some type of microformats that could describe artwork images with attributes such as genre, medium etc. Whether we're talking about art or the family photos, being able to search for images reliably with specific attributes would be really interesting.

On a side note, currently over 70% of my traffic (and almost 100% of my search-engine originated traffic) comes from Google. Also wondering why Yahoo seems to not crawl my site very often (judging from my logs) nor originate any traffic compared to Google.

Great! Its good to see the move to semantic web. This will introduce new play ground to all web users!

I think this will be the tipping point for widespread acceptance and implementation of semantic technologies. Fantastic work Yahoo!

Very interesting differentiation from competitors in the search experience. Also like the idea of allowing site-owners to help make search results listings much more relevant for searchers. Should also help make information on search results pages much more relevant for users. Win-win all around. Would love to get more information and get our company engaged.

Peter

So, does this mean that Yahoo will be getting their sites like del.icio.us, and flickr to spit out RDF in some shape or form ?

Amit, thank you for announcing another bold step Yahoo has taken to support standards and open frameworks. I think that a really important part of Information Architecture and the User Experience is "findability." Yahoo's step is a good one if the machines can make sense of the semantic data and present it in a more useful way to people.

From a web designer/developer perspective, it's a bit daunting for me to think about how an object's meta information can be very large, have different levels of complexity and exist in many different parts of the web.

What effort is being made to bring semantic web standards closer to the ISO standards body? I can imagine that the components and vocabularies could become more controlled given their potentially huge impact.

Amit,
Will your team work on providing support for the (proposed) hProduct microformat:
http://microformats.org/wiki/hproduct-proposal

so that e-commerce sites have an incentive to participate?

This is great news for the Data Web -some mainstream love.

It will be really interesting to see how some of yahoo!'s web-2.0-y acquisitions like delicious and flickr will be able to integrate into the next gen of yahoo! search as well, and in turn, how users of yahoo!'s services might benefit from integration between yahoo!'s services and yahoo! being plugged into Semantics from across the Web.

Yay!

Semantic web is a great thing, but it mean that Yahoo will be getting their sites like del.icio.us, and digg?

Nice to see semantics being given priority over dumb text-based techniques. The UK public sector has set up a framework for this with the Electronic Government Metadata Standard (eGMS) extending Dublin Core. It uses the open subject vocabulary IPSV - see http://www.esd.org.uk/standards/ipsv.

It would be nice to see if/how their ongoing developments fit into the Yahoo work.

This is really great to hear, kudos... Maybe you can also somehow influence your apparent acquirer-to-be to finally offer application/xhtml+xml support in its browser, so the world can actually become interoperable in the structured, extensible way true XHTML, working as XML, offers.

But on the other end of the spectrum, instead of only trying to extract bits of semantics stuffed into X/HTML (which is a great beginning), I'd hope to see other richly semantic languages like TEI and DocBook get their own targeted support. OWL would certainly be an interesting one if you could come up with a sufficiently user-friendly interface.

But to make all that work really well, I'm also curious whether you could make SPARQL or XQuery (at least XPath) could somehow fit into a truly powerful web search engine... Imagine, for example, being able to search across all TEI documents on the web to find all letters from documents containing a 1776 date in the letter opening--or whatever.

Academics, power users, your third party developers--and I think even eventually the masses of somewhat educated users--would love you for it...

This is a huge opportunity.
Well done Yahoo.
Customer centric controlled lists present an enormous opportunity to improve search results.

The intelligent use of these may provide excpetional citizen facing value.

For example
When will my refuse be collected during the Winter holiday?

With options to categorise preferred lists and include geo spatial referencing (zip/post codes), citizens will be able to localise results and improve hits. With more in-depth use of these solutions plus concept/phrase based inter layering, maybe the web can be tamed!

Wow, like +10?

Of course, now you just need OpenID on all your blog properties... ;) But this is HUGE!

Awesome! I was just writing up some ideas on marketing in the semantic web -- and some parallels between branding and the semantic web. Semantic marketing? Semantic branding? This seems like it will herald the next generation of SEO. Call it SEO++ (because it is sort of object-oriented)?

Here's a link to that article on semantic marketing if you're interested:
http://www.chiefmartec.com/2008/03/marketing-in-th.html

Hi Amit,

I've got a bit ahead of myself and implemented the hAtom microformat on my blog.

And here's a link to my article that shows you how I did it:

http://beardygeek.com/2008/03/15/web-30-how-to-put-semantic-tags-in-your-blog/

Thanks for the good news!

Cheers

Stuart

Thank you, Amit and Yahoo, for as Abdel Olakara said above, the tipping point. Are your expectations consistent with those of Phil Nash and Chris Messina, also stated above, that this will drive users to add semantic tags for SEO purposes? I suspect they are correct but would love to hear Yahoo�s thoughts on this and the need for more convergence in upper ontologies or whether you expect that will be driven organically from micro-formats and through a clustering or more explicitly collaborative process. And what of companies like Metaweb, Radar Networks, Reuters and others who are developing their own, more substantial ontologies? Will ontology itself be a viable intellectual property asset in the Yahoo world or will all the value be in what you do with the links once Yahoo has indexed the semantic web?

I really like this idea and wonder how quickly the microformats will evolve. I'd personally like to see recipes, sports scores and products.

Does seem like the first really interesting thing to happen in search for quite a while.

We have done something similar on our B2B web site, but for products. It greatly improved readability of the results and made the searches much more successful (big drop in exit rates).
I really like what Yahoo is doing and can't wait to try it out.

How long will it take for this to take effect?

I suggest that you use the Yahoo services like the Yahoo answers , Yahoo blog and yahoo marketing services. This could be the possible way to increase traffic from yahoo
Also add your site to yahoo site explorer and upload your sitemap feed for one if you have not already done so .As far as i know, Yahoo is giving more weight or value on the on-page factors of a site. This include KW usage and visibility

Yahoo has done a great job for me and my company. Thanks and keep up the great work.

I've always had an interest in semantics (web and in real life), and after being introduced to Microformats through a web work shop with Andy Clarke I can really see the value in well marked up content.

The more reasons you can give to be found the more likely it is you will ... good to see Yahoo pushing forward things that are good for the web, too many companies just leech the web and never give anything back.

Yahoo is an excellent exception.

I really like this idea and wonder how quickly the microformats will evolve. I'd personally like to see recipes, sports scores and products.

I suggest that you use the Yahoo services like the Yahoo answers , Yahoo blog and yahoo marketing services. This could be the possible way to increase traffic from yahoo

When will Yahoo! support hList tags? I want to use them on an e-commerce site. Thanks!

I really like this idea and wonder how quickly the microformats will evolve. I'd personally like to see recipes, sports scores and products.

Yahoo has done a great job for me and my company.

This could be the possible way to increase traffic from yahoo

This include KW usage and visibility

This is a tremendous advancement. Keep up the great work Yahoo.

Semantic search standards, at last! Thank you Yahoo!!

I find your Semantic search standard to be an interesting differentiation from competitors in the search experience. I also think the idea of allowing site-owners to help make search results listings much more relevant for searchers. The open question is, will this help make information on search results pages much more relevant for users. Let me know if I can get more information si I can begin using the microformats.

Yahoo has once again proved that it is the Search Engine Giant and the biggest internet resource.

Nice job done. Yahoo is the greatest.

Won't this be abused by SEO people?
How will that be dealt with?!

That's a great news. Go on Yahoo!

I agree, this type of search will revolutionize the industry. Whe will we see a speech based search actually in motion?

I don't think this technology will be able to create an imparting effect. Nice post though.

Great news. Keep it up