How the Semantic Web is Changing Search Engines
The Search Technology Case Studies of Hakia and Swoogle
Dec 24, 2008
Semantic searching uses algorithms which set it apart from traditional search algorithms from Google's or Yahoo's. Second-generation web search engine technologies are said to provide more controlled searching, semantic searching improves traditional search engine querying by using XML and RDF data from semantic networks.
In doing so, semantic search engines attempt to disambiguate search queries and text words, semantic search attempts to increase relevancy of results.
Disambiguation through Semantic Indexing
In the current key word-based text searching web, a great deal of confusion occurs when there two or more key concepts are not distinguishable. In particular, words which have homonyms and synonyms often need to be disambiguated during the search process. When a term is ambiguous, it can have several meanings.
For example, for a key term such as 'oasis", which can be understood as "a fertile tract in a desert" "the British rock band," or "a now defunct airline", a regular search engine might have difficulty disambiguating without proper context, but for a semantic search engine, the most probable meaning is chosen from all those possible.
Semantic Search Engines
Although there have been many search engine companies which have tried to defeat Google in terms of popularity and effectiveness at retrieval, there has yet to be a search engine capable of unseating Google. There have been two new search engines which use Semantic Search technologies in challenging existing search engines as the next Google.
hakia
hakia is semantic search engine, in which its focus is on quality, not popularity (like Google's PageRank algorithm), which use statistical ranking methods. The main deficiency with popularity ranking of Web sites is that such web sites may not always be credible, and credible Web sites may not always be popular.
Consequently, search results may suffer in many ways ranging from wasted search time to using misleading information. hakia is a semantic search engine that brings relevant results based on concept match rather than keyword match or popularity ranking. In doing so, hakia uses ontological semantic and natural language processing (NLP) in its search algorithms.
Swoogle
Unlike hakia, Swoogle is a search engine that specifically retrieves Semantic Web information on the Web. Swoogle crawls the World Wide Web for Semantic Web documents, which are written in resource and description framework (RDF) standards.
As a result, while the coverage is quite limited due to the fact that there are few webpages that are written in RDF and therefore does not function as a search engine in the sense of hakia or Google, Swoogle instead has an accurate retrieval rate of the Semantic Web, which includes Semantic Web ontologies, Semantic Web instance data, and different archived versions of Semantic Web documents.
The "Killer Application"
Major venture capital firms have been investing in Semantic Web technology companies, and it is said that it will take a "killer application" that will propel the Semantic Web to the next stage of the Web. There is a good chance that such an application could be in the form of a Semantic Search Engine.
 |
 |
