Yahoo Semantic Web Adoption

SES NY closed this past Thursday, leading off the last day with a presentation by Yahoo Chief Scientist Andrew Tompkins. Mr. Tompkins' presentation centers around Yahoo's recent announcement that it is embracing a number of  Semantic Web standards.

As presented by Mr. Tompkins, Yahoo is attempting to shift the focus away from the 10 blue links and aim it's sights on user intent. That is, users are conducting a web search to accomplish a specific task. Whether that is task is to find a good Chili Recipe, get the phone number of the local hardware store, or find the top rated steak house in New York City, these tasks center around specific content consumption. Yahoo hopes to bring that specific information to the surface as quickly as possible, thus satisfying the user intent in the most efficient means possible.

Several examples were given in the presentation and Amit Kumar, Product Management Director for Yahoo! Search, gives a LinkedIn sample on his blog.  For a user search for him, rather than just returning a link back to his LinkedIn profile, the search will see something like this:

You can image similar search results that can surface restaurant rantings, contact information, movies times, and other specific details about the search subject.  To accomplish this, Yahoo!is supporting a few different mechanisms that will allow site owners to send specific page meta data  (i.e. the semantics) to the search engine.

The first of these is the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Using RDF, site publishers can embed meta content tags directly into each web page. These tags would describe the key content themes of the page, which the search engines can then pick up and subsequently use to inform search result ranking and presentation. To achieve similar results, Yahoo! is supporting Microformats as well as several semantic web vocabularies  (Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others).

Along with Google Universal Search, this is another example of a major search engine acting more and more like a destination. Yahoo! already brings much of it's own content to the top of the search results. Yahoo! Local content headlines a search for "NYC Steak House"...

... and Yahoo! Food gets top billing for "Turkey Recipes."

You can also now play YouTube videos directly within Yahoo! search results. From the search engine perspective, keeping the user on the search results page longer is preferable. They don't don't monetize those clicks from the organic results, and the longer they hang around the more likely it is they'll eventually click on a CPC ad.

From an SEO perspective, the rules of the game are changing. As the search engines become the information source, organic clicks will decrease. Bucking the trend won't be an option since you can expect sites that open themselves up and provide the rich meta data the engines want will surely find their way to the top.

For some businesses this will work out well. Local businesses should be happy to have phone numbers, addresses, maps, etc. exposed directly on the search engine result pages. After all, they're online to be found and mostly get people into the store / bookstore / bistro. Content producers, however, and other sites whose monetization strategy is largely tied to page views will face a challenge. If the latest scandalous picture or funny video or restaurant rating is delivered to the user without them ever having to leave the search engine, organic traffic to these sites will surely suffer.