The “semantic Web” is something that has been discussed for a good amount of time as the “next incarnation” of the Web. The idea of the semantic Web is that rather than simply marking up content for presentation, content is marked up for meaning. According to Wikipedia:
The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. It derives from World Wide Web Consortium director Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.
Google has taken a step in supporting this direction by beginning to include richly formatted entries in its results (from non-owned sites–it’s been doing this for YouTube for awhile, obviously), apparently by beginning to interpret semantic tagging embedded in websites:
Google’s Rich Snippets can decode two different Semantic Web technologies–RDFa and microformats–to produce its enhanced search results, which seem to be popular among those advocating this approach to Web development.
The company said it would not penalize publishers who do not participate in the Rich Snippets program by declaring their Web pages less relevant, which theoretically makes this an opt-in program. But Google’s Goel acknowledged that Web pages enhanced with Rich Snippets could see higher click-through rates, which would improve their relevance in Google’s algorithm.
This has implications for search engine optimization because of the visual prominence that Rich Snippets provide on a search results page.
Google embraces exercise in Semantics | Digital Media – CNET News.
