Yahoo’s embrace of all things open continues today – expect an announcement in an hour or so that they are expanding their Open Search Platform that we wrote about last month.
In that previous announcement, Yahoo talked about their plans to allow third parties to alter and enhance search results with structured data that may be useful to users. Today, they’ll give more details on the developer platform and will announce support for a number of semantic web standards.
What does all this mean? It means we can expect the web to get itself organized, in a hurry. At stake is a significant amount of traffic from Yahoo search, and anyone else that may choose to build applications on top of this data.
Yahoo’s support for semantic web standards like RDF and microformats is exactly the incentive websites need to adopt them. Instead of semantic silos scattered across the Web (think Twine), Yahoo will be pulling all the semantic information together when available, as a search engine should. Until now, there were few applications that demanded properly structured data from third parties. That changes today.
One example Yahoo director of product management Amit Kumar and others gave me during a briefing yesterday is LinkedIn – were they to mark up user profile pages with microformats, Yahoo search could understand the content and relationships between pieces of content. Yahoo can then present that data in an intelligent way in Yahoo search. “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 site,” Yahoo says. Here’s how it will look in search results (see our previous post on Yahoo Open Search for how this is implemented):
Any third party can create mods for Yahoo search that leverage their semantic data (Yahoo will be launching a beta program in a few weeks, along with a developer launch party). Some lucky ones will be added by default to all searches.
A few details are being disclosed now, and Yahoo promises more in a few weeks. They are saying that they will support a number of microformats at the start: hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom and XFN. They will support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others. They will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, Yahoo will support the Amazon A9 OpenSearch specification with extensions for structured queries to deep web data.
Erick Schonfeld wrote a post in February urging Yahoo to open up search completely to compete with Google. Yahoo isn’t heading in that direction, yet. But they sure look like they might get there eventually.
THis is bigger than AOL/Bebo as far as I’m concerned….
Now people can finally get over Twine as a “semantic web” application… yahoo will show you all how it’s done.
simply. wow!
Yahoo! will just continue to impress, and surprise, the world… good job.. great CEO too!
This is definately far bigger than AOL/Bebo. go yahoo!
This is probably not as good as it seems.
Wouldn’t Google have gone in this direction FIRST – it is could provide better results??
Awesome. Also big time validation for the individual crusaders for the cited web standards ( Chris Messina ) but…
Won’t this all just be instantly abandon if Microsoft buys them? Like one millisecond after the deal is cleared, all support for open web standards is retracted? Open web standards do NOT trap people to the Windows operating system, in fact, they help free people from it.
Welcome to the Open Data Web!
Now we just have to enable the users to give the data meanings [that are machine readable] — viz., semantically.
nice.
i like this move by yahoo. maybe they are doing this so microsoft will increase their bid. i mean it’s one of the logical reasons behind this sudden launch of new products and innovation by the Y! camp. i really like this.
hope it gains enough steam to trample the evil google monopoly! go Y!
well, technically it’s no big deal. but the fact that finally one of the bug guys is pushing it, can change a lot. let’s see how long it takes until web developers annotate their sites by default…
I thought LinkedIn already published microformats!
This is nothing since it seems to complex atm. The same reason why XSLT and XML failed to achieve the hype. If someone comes with a simple solution that immediately shows its benefits versus the costs, then this would be game changing. However, I suspect that someone will be Google, and not Yahoo.
Yahoo is all set to be back with a bang !! Good job Yahoo
Now Yahoo! syncs itself up with the rest of the players… nice, at least technically.
This could be huge depending on what they mean by “support.” One of the earlier commenters is write: Complexity is the big barrier right now. But if they provide tools to help automate adding in semantic data, this could very quickly become a de facto standard which could make the web MUCH more useful, esp. for those data farming and mashing.
Come on Yahoo! You can do it. We all want you to survive and thrive. Keep innovating. Keep doing something spectacular. This is the way to go.
The users will come. We promise.
We all want to!
Go go microformats!
Cool if they can get the seo woes right!
So this is why Yahoo fired the whole designer team?
LinkedIn already marks up its pages in hResume, so they should be able to do this (at least with LinkedIn).
It’s a great piece of news though, we’ll have to see what it looks like in the implementation.
Is everyone drinking the koolaid?! Didn’t “web services” .Net etc… promise similar capabilities to ping sites for structured data? Seems like search results would be rather limited in the amount of data they returned. Still doesn’t make sense when “people search” companies do this kind of searching of social networks right now.
Round and round we go, where the tech companies go no ones knows! Except me, because soon, everyone is going to get blip’d!
I’m a bit more reluctant to believe the hype or promise of this. There are technical and human hurdles to deal with – semantically marking up data is hard, and humans can still get things wrong. Yahoo will still need to put in ‘best guess’ algorithms and such to compensate.
But the bigger issue is why would someone like linkedin semantically mark up all their profile pages, at least for public consumption? It makes it that much easier for competitors to come and take away the one set of data that makes linkedin unique – the relationship data they have about their users. For me, what makes linkedin linkedin is the set of relationships (and to a lesser extent, what tools linkedin provides to exploit those relationships).
Adding semantic markup to linkedin profile pages will make it easier for Yahoo to show more information. Great. But it also makes it easier for everyone, including Linkedin and Yahoo’s competitors, to scrape intelligently, and offer bigger/better/faster/cheaper.
Now, there are certainly other benefits regarding cross-domain info linking – being able to better know the relationships between data across multiple data sets, for example. Again, good, but not great, imo.
It’s certainly a chicken/egg situation, but I’m also not sure that’ll we have the same incentives that we did 10 years ago before the massive commercialization. For every argument for semantic markup, there’s gotta be at least one competing commercial interest against it.
That’s my 2 cents as to why this will be an uphill battle.
@22 – it’s all about portability… notably, DataPortability — as you know…
Despite the challenges and criticisms Yahoo faces I’m amazed that they continue to innovate. Microhoo would kill all innovation and start cloning Google’s product (with a 2-3 year lag of course). Way to go Yahoo!
This news piece got me thinking – what if semantic print were to exist?
What I mean by semantic print is application of RDF & microformats like standards applied to components that make up a print publication (flyers, brochures, newspapers, magazines, etc…) Just like semantic web promises to make search engines and mash ups better among others, semantic print would allow content repurposing, new packaging/print products and cost efficiencies in print production.
Google’s interactive ads is also a step in this direction where by content also carries intent/action. On the production side there are a lot of print content management systems (Alfresco, Quark Publishing System, Documentum) out there promises this, but no clear winner exists yet in this space.
I guess evolution happens out of chaos only and not every information in the world can be structured.
All I can really say is…
Sweet!
Wow. This is just awesome. Now the microformats I use will actually be indexed properly.
Can Twine compete with Yahoo? It may sound like a ridiculous question (and I am not clear what the overlaps will and won’t be) Amazon smoking Barnes and Noble etc. once seemed ridiculous, Microsoft over IBM, etc.
Earliest adopters (large and small) generally have incredible odds against fending off later entrants. Think about Dell’s success for example and how it has been accomplished. It innovates very little.
I haven’t seen Twine but I think Nova Spivak is a talented individual. And it will be interesting to see Yahoo’s effort.
This is great. This is definitely changing search as we know it and certainly giving Yahoo a much needed edge. Yahoo! talk these days is wild. If anything, it’s good PR.
Just for the record, LinkedIn has been a major publisher of microformats since 2006. We’ve been marking up our data with hCard, hCalendar, hReview, and perhaps most importantly, every LinkedIn public profile is marked up in hResume.
This is great news!
This is great news. Together with Google’s support of microformats via the SocialGraph API there is now really good incentive for sites to mark up their public pages with microformats. Plaxo is another site supporting this with our recently released public profile pages: http://therealm...public-profile/
dumb question, but I hope someone can help. if Yahoo and Google do more to support mircoformats, does this mean we will all hear less about annoying “web 3.0″ companies like twine and radar? please let the answer be yes.
my web development dreams are coming true!
watch microformats quickly become a spam vector
we had this once before, called the meta tag
then everyone put adult terms in the meta tag to juice ranking
so the search engines stopped indexing meta tags
now the problem has just been moved to a new format, in a year people will be lamenting how microformat spam is spoiling results
sorry, humans cannot be trusted to describe their own data, this is why we have tech like pagerank in the first place
the SEO industry has now a major lease of life. kinko’s will be busy printing new business cards with ‘SEO Semantic Web Expert’ job titles.
@whoopie – interesting spin
Blodget is the best! Yahoo to be bought at $35 a share by next week.
It’s about time.
Good for Yahoo moving to the semantic web! More info here: http://semantis...m/company/yahoo
As a developer using YUI, I would like to know if this support will be built into YUI and what the dateline for this is???
In response to:
“This is probably not as good as it seems.
Wouldn’t Google have gone in this direction FIRST – it is could provide better results??”
You could imagine why Google would NOT want a semantic technology to be successful. How would ad revenue be affected by a search engine that returned ‘meaningful’ results? Less clicks? Less revenue?
I understand that semantic search technology (magic) has not had its breakthrough moment, but…imagine the implications. Either we applaud innovation, or we continue to settle for a search like, “buffalo city new york please work”
Substitute the word Yahoo! for Google and re-read the story. Now, how do you react?
I would also like to know if there are plans to continue YUI on sourceforge after Microsoft takes over and kills it?
Can you sign up for this anywhere?
I am already modifying the library.
I’m not surprised that Yahoo is the one that does this. They need to do something new if they want to take market share from Google.
I’m with Michael K. As a corporation which builds databases with retail and shopping center locations, why would I want to make it easy for competitors to access this data?? I think the only incentive for me to provide this mark up would be if my site was listed higher in organic search results.
I’m confused. Does this mean Yahoo will be marking up their pages on all their properties with Microformats? Or are they hoping to read Microformats on other people’s sites, index them and provide search into them?
Just as with the Google Social Graph API project, all I can say is it’s about time. There’s a huge amount of structured data out there in FOAF, RDF, Microformats and so on. Reading it and aggregating it is a search engine sized problem. But up until the last two months the big search engines have just ignored it.
I saw the demo Amit did last month in Santa Clara and it looked very interesting. I do hope Yahoo! makes their documentation clear for all users and not just developers. I think there are lots of sites run by non-technical people that would like to use them, but get stuck when they can’t find good documentation or support structures.
Yes….Great move by Yahooo !!!
….but what will the developers and the content creators receive in return for helping Yahoo have great semantic search ?
Is this more web 2.0 share cropping that gives content creators and developers nothing in return for their work or their content.
How come the content creators and developers that will be helping Yahoo dont get a piece of the action….so cash for their work…maybe even stock option….what a concept….contribution for raising the value of a company in exchange for pay or equity….the last time i checked this is how it is supposed to work…..Oh and Yahoo…if you want to be more “Open” how about switching to Lucen….Its Open, well documented and it works….You can out develop thousands if developers from around the world….Well Yahoo will not do this….and they will not pay developers or content creators…..
And on the Bebo purchase….any of that 850 million going to trickle down to members that have made them what they are ? Doubt it
Hi all,
I think this is good news. Yahoo have always been quite good at looking into categorisation (see the Yahoo Directory ), and RDF is perfect for categorisation and representing true relationship links. They also have an excellent research team (see Yahoo Research ), which includes a few people from the Semantic Web and W3C communities.
I am quite interested to see how this RDF & Microformats stuff works out, and how it might hook in to the Linked Data Cloud (see ). A lot of us in the Semantic Web are looking at finding ways to query the Web using a formal query language called SPARQL, and this is all part of the Linked Data project (see ), which is all about cross-domain relationships. I hope that whatever Yahoo does, it does it with Linked Data in mind.
As for supporting Amazon OpenSearch, I am quite happy to hear this… its a nice little system.
As for Microsoft’s attempt to take over Yahoo, I am quite glad they failed to be honest because these kinds of projects would have probably been terminated (although saying that, Microsoft are getting their washing their hands with some RDF ).
As for the Google Social Graph API, its nice that they have noticed FOAF and XFN, but there is still a lot more that could be done and has been by other companies.