Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

It isn’t a Semantic Web application in the capital sense of the words, but Google gained the nod as the Product of the Year in this year’s Intranet Journal award in the semantic web category.

So, how does Google qualify to win in the semantics category? Well, a Google spokesperson, Eitan Bencuya of Google Corporate Communications, points out that it has always been in the business of extracting semantics from the web — understanding words and phrases and the relations between them; understanding relations between pages and sites; and understanding a user’s needs as expressed in a query or a sequence of queries. The company continues to build semantic resources by extracting information from the web, and using those resources to do a better job of search, ad-matching, and other tasks, Bencuya says.

Additionally, Bencuya points to R.V. Guha’s patent of Google’s “programmable search engine.” Guha was the originator of the RDF protocol, one of the first and most important semantic web representation frameworks, while he was at Netscape. At Google, he built these ideas into what the company calls the Google Custom Search Engine (CSE).

CSE makes it possible for a user to customize an existing search engine to give results that the user thinks are most relevant to a topic, as long as the results are already part of Google’s index. The customization features range from basic things, such as editing colors, to more complex things, such as choosing the most relevant sites, and providing a menu of search refinements to guide the user through unfamiliar territory.

As for semantic web standards, Bencuya says it wholeheartedly embraces and encourages open standards, including RDF and OWL, but he notes that they have not yet had a significant impact on the web. The search engine vendor sees the technology as applicable for smaller-scale, collaborative, like-minded communities, such as scientists working on bioinformatics. Of course, some other emerging search companies see larger-scale applicability, to which Google responds that it welcomes the competition in the highly competitive industry as a driver of innovation and for providing users with more choices.

Google, Bencuya says, is continuously working to develop robust and scalable features that improve the search experience for its users, and conducting research in all promising areas of search technology.

The runner-up in the category was a Semantic Web application, in capitals: Metaweb Technology’s Freebase, whose goal is to become an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge.

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