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"Search has changed dramatically over the past year and semantic technology has been at the center of it all. Consumers increasingly expect search engines to understand natural language and perceive the intent behind the words they type in, and search engine algorithms are rising to this challenge. This evolution in search has dramatic implications for marketers, consumers, technology developers and content creators - and it's still the early days for this rapidly changing environment. Here is an overview of how search technology is changing, how these changes may affect you and what you can do to market your business more effectively in the new era of search."

"Janice Lawrence of Semantic Arts recently shared a list of five business benefits - and truly, public benefits - of semantic technology solutions. Here are the benefits that she came up with along with links to some of our own articles underscoring each point. "

Semantics can enhance a broad variety of information processing - search, integration, analysis, pattern extraction and mining, discovery, situational awareness, and question-answering. Consider search: a search system that could distinguish between "Merry Christmas" as a greeting and one of the 60 or so songs named "Merry Christmas" as cataloged in MusicBrainz (a community-created music encyclopedia; http://musicbrainz.org) would have a powerful semantic search capability.

Web search engines have become indispensable tools for finding information online effectively. As the range of information, context and users of Internet searches has grown, the relationship between the search query, search interest and user has become more tenuous. Not all users are seeking the same information, even if they use the same query term. Thus, the quality of search results has, at least potentially, been decreasing. Search engines have begun to respond to this problem by trying to personalise search in order to deliver more relevant results to the users. A query is now evaluated in the context of a user's search history and other data compiled into a personal profile and associated with statistical groups. This, at least, is the promise stated by the search engines themselves. This paper tries to assess the current reality of the personalisation of search results. We analyse the mechanisms of personalisation in the case of Google web search by empirically testing three commonly held assumptions about what personalisation does. To do this, we developed new digital methods which are explained here. The findings suggest that Google personal search does not fully provide the much-touted benefits for its search users. More likely, it seems to serve the interest of advertisers in providing more relevant audiences to them.

A new search engine allows users to search for good news. According to the article, "Jurriaan Kamp editor of Ode Magazine in San Francisco has created a new search engine. Ode Wire, available here in its beta form uses semantic search technology to spot optimism on the web, and delivers users news stories from an 'uplifting' angle.

In Barbara Starr's (Ontologica) session this week at Semtech 2011, San Francisco, she presented a detailed timeline outlining the adoption of RDFa and semantic search enhancements by the major search engines.

"Search is evolving to fit the needs of users who don't just want a web site, but the actual answer to the question driving the search. To stay on top semantic search technologies are key."

"We are no longer a general purpose search engine," Kavanaugh tells us. Instead, Ask.com uses proprietary, semantic search technology to deliver answers from its own content banks, community, experts, and from all over the web.

The PANDA Project, a winner of this year's Knight News Challenge, is what developer Brian Boyer calls a "newsroom data application," a tool that helps find context and relationships on the fly. Boyer, the news applications editor at the Chicago Tribune, will lead the project, which plans to create a set of web-based open source tools that will allow any newsroom to set up their own PANDA to analyze data whenever the need arises.

Since the open data movement has shown no declining signals, several hubs, or data markets, have been released. This was a direct consequence of the need for ways to search all different data sets

Ontotext