Yahoo! - the subject of a hostile takeover attempt from Microsoft – had just announced it would be building the semantic web principles into its search engine as well as adopting some of the key ‘standards’ (rules about categorising, tagging information, which will standardise the method in which data is organised while indexing a piece of information on the Internet). These standards are very crucial, as they offer a simple, consistent means of easily adding relevant context to data.

“While there has been huge progress made towards understanding the semantics of web content, the advantages of a data web haven’t reached the mainstream consumer,” stated Yahoo!’s director of project management, Amit Kumar. He added, “Site owners have been reluctant to support standards, without a killer semantic web application for consumers.”

Yahoo! thinks that it’ll encourage web site owners for investing more time in the process of attaching standardised metadata to all the relevant information that they put on their sites by indexing semantically tagged pages. This should ensure a higher ranking as well as larger exposure in Yahoo! search results. “Yahoo! search & site owners can create a far richer, more useful search experience for consumers by supporting semantic web standards,” stated Kumar.