Semantics & Search Engine Optimisation
Gerrit Jan van Ahee · 2008
Although the Semantic Web is a concept of the late 1990s, it still has not been widely adopted due to lack of a killer application. This paper performs three case studies on search engines, to analyse whether these could offer the incentive to webmasters to add meta-data to their websites. This origins from the Search Engine Optimisation field, where webmasters are known to do ” anything” to get more traffic from search engines. The results of the case studies shows Yahoo! takes the leads towards the Semantic Web. They have adopted RDF, RDFa and Microformats and offer an Application Programming Interface to webmasters to extend the Search Engine. Google and Hakia have not entered the field of semantics yet. T he conclusion of this paper is that the efforts of Yahoo! will encourge webmasters to add metadata to their websites. As soon as Google enters the field, the Semantic Web will soon come within reach.