In his latest entry on the Yahoo Search Blog, Vish Makhijani, discusses "Yahoo! Search An Open Approach to Search". This post builds on last weeks announcement of the largest Hadoop production application and I love it. It's innovative, especially for content producers. They, we finally get a say in the output of Yahoo's search results like never before. Regardless if you're a content producer or searcher you can sign up for more information here.
"Because the platform is open it gives all Web site owners -- big or small -- an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page as compared to what is presented on other search engines. Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites -- ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data -- directly on the Yahoo! Search results page."
Of course for Yahoo it means more more content for them hopefully providing more searchers and gaining on Google's marker share. I think it's a strategy that benefits site owners and Yahoo alike and shows that Yahoo is far from dead. I for one hope that they don't merge with Microsoft.
In Other News
Nitin Karandikar over at the The Software Abstractions Blog has a good post on the semantic web, or what some people are calling Web 3.0.
Semantic Web: Where are the Meaning-Enabled Authoring Tools? looks at the growing concept of the semantic web and a presumed gap with content authoring tools. Nitin asks some interesting questions and offers his opinion which basically comes down to getting publishers to include semantic meaning into new content they produce and existing content. While I like the idea of adding semantic meaning to new content going through existing content and adding it is a time consuming, expensive venture which I doubt few publishers will want to do.