Grauw’s blog

After Yahoo’s SearchMonkey was announced out with RDFa support last year, there is now an even bigger announcement: Google will also add support for RDFa. This could really give RDFa the critical mass, or killer app if you wish, that it needs.

Frankly this came as quite a surprise, I always though that Google’s business was based on text indexing and structured data was kind of antithetical to their business goals. But I’m very glad with this development. And what excellent timing re. the ongoing HTML5 discussion! This gives me some hope :).

Also be sure to read this nice interview with the Google engineers on the subject, which describes well the benefits of this platform and what great future this could bring to the web.

To see an example of semantic search, you can try the search field on Freebase. When you e.g. enter “Pascal” there, it will show several different kinds of Pascals (the programming language, the pressure unit, the philosopher…), which are all uniquely identified so that you can indicate which Pascal you mean, and find further information. Now imagine this spanning the entirety of the web, so that you could just get those search results on the topic that you are actually searching for.