Rich snippets – yep, they were a nice start, but Russian search engine Yandex thinks it’s time for something more powerful. Something it’s calling interactive snippets and a feature it’s branding as Islands for its search results pages.

Yandex says the new feature evolves from rich snippets, which CTO Ilya Segalovich refers to in the press release as “mere decoration.” Interactive snippets, in contrast, are actionable, letting users do things like book movie tickets, make reservations or pay bills right from the search page. Webmasters can choose to add this functionality to their web sites if they want to, and while it may get their business customers – especially those using smartphones and tablets – who want to make their transactions as seamless as possible, it does mean those users won’t be making the journey to the business’ own web site.

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David Amerland of Imassera recently shared his opinion on why he thinks Google will win the semantic search race. He writes, “Google was a latecomer to search. When you’re the new kid on the block the paths that’ll lead you to the top of the hill are strictly limited: innovate or be the best. Innovation is the obvious one, of course, because it creates buzz, sets you out from the rest at first sight and draws the attention of the Press and those who can give you publicity. Being the best is harder. Read more

Pete Swabey of Information Age recently discussed UNIT4, “the Dutch-owned ERP vendor that acquired UK accounting software provider Coda in 2008. The company collaborated with UK semantic web consultancy Epimorphics to develop a platform that allowed customers to expose their data online as SPARQL endpoints, meaning it could be retrieved using SPARQL, the querying language for RDF. The platform was developed with local authorities in mind, facing as they are growing pressure to be transparent. ‘We were hoping we would have an audience of armchair auditors,’ recalls Pete Brown, chief technology officer of UNIT4 UK.” Read more

Aaron Bradley of SEOSkeptic reports, “On Beet.TV, Andy Plesser recently featured a short but fascinating video of Michael Zimbalist, Vice President of Research and Development Operations at the New York Times, talking with Joanna O’Connell of Forrester about a prototype linked data search engine being developed by the Times. Zimbalist begins by talking about the great asset that is the New York Times Index, and the relationship between the Index’s metadata and linked data.” Read more

Common Crawl, the non-profit organization creating a repository of openly and freely accessible web crawl data, is getting a present from search engine provider blekko. It’s donating its metadata on search engine ranking for 140 million websites and 22 billion webpages to Common Crawl.

“The blekko data donation is a huge benefit to Common Crawl,” Common Crawl director Lisa Green told The Semantic Web Blog. “Knowing what the blekko team is crawling and how they rate those pages allows us to improve our crawler and enrich our corpus for high-value webpages.”

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Image courtesy of Pixomar / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Search engine Yandex this week added personalization capabilities for Eastern European users’ search results. It analyses their online behavior including their search history, clicks on search results, and language preferences for its suggestions.

Kaliningrad is the name of the latest edition of Yandex’ personalized search engine. It uses that information to make suggestions and rank search results individually tailored for each user, showing book lovers that do a search on Harry Potter links related to the books, while those who prefer movies get film-oriented link fare.

Semantic markup didn’t play a role in the development of the technology, Yandex technical product manager and developer advocate Alexander Shubin says. But it can be applied for future enhancements, he notes. The new personalization reportedly leverages Yandex’ machine-learning-based query and search results algorithms “Spectrum” and “MatrixNet” to train the results to users’ requirements.

That said, Yandex has been diving deeper into semantic web waters. Beyond taking advantage of sites using schema.org markup to improve the display of search results, Shubin provides this update: “We enhanced our markup validator to understand all the markup (Open Graph, schema.org, RDFa, microformats). It is universal now (as Google’s or Bing’s instruments).”

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Photo credit: FlickR/crd!

With Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Small Business Saturday behind us, and Cyber-Monday right in front of us, it is clear the holiday season is in full force. Apparently, retailers – both online and real-world – are doing pretty well as a group when it comes to sales racked up.

Reports have it that e-commerce topped the $1 billion mark for Black Friday in the U.S. for the first time this year, with Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple taking honors as the most visited online stores, according to ComScore. Consumers spent $11.2 billion at stores across the U.S. on Black Friday, said ShopperTrak, down from last year but probably impacted by more people heading out to more stores for deals that began on Thursday night. The National Retail Federation put total spending over the four-day weekend at a record $59.1 billion, up 13 percent from $52.4 billion last year.

Not surprisingly, semantic technology wants in on the shopping action. Social intelligence vendor NetBase, for instance, just launched a new online tool that analyzes the web for mentions of the 10 top retailers to show the mood of shoppers flocking to those sources. The Mood Meter, which media outlets and others can embed in their sites, ranks the 10 brands based on sentiment unearthed with the help of its natural language processing technology.  Read more

Tech2 reports, “The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) unveiled Internet search engine, Sandhan, yesterday to assist users searching for tourism-related information across websites. Sandhan will provide search results to user queries in five Indian languages – Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.  Launched by J Satyanarayana, Secretary of DEITY, Sandhan has been developed by 120 researchers of 12 institutions over a period of six years, led by Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharya under the Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) programme of DEITY. As stated in an official release, the project aims to satisfy the need of users for information through text documents present on the web.” Read more

What can semantic search do for your enterprise? One example comes from the recently launched Searchbox online semantic search engine by the company of the same name (which formerly was known as salsaDev).

One of the vendor’s biggest customers is the European Commission, according to Nicolas Gamard, CEO of the Switzerland-based company. That early adopter of Searchbox is using the technology for improving search related to its public grants funding, which amounts to tens of billions of dollars since 2007. Before deploying Searchbox, both researchers and its own commissioners struggled with conducting searches across 15 different repositories, as they looked for previously funded projects and partnership possibilities across the continent, for example. Tooling through a research grant PDF document of some 150 to 600 pages was another time-consuming issue, he says.

“It was like a full-time job just to look at all the different data sources. Things were not formatted in the same way – they used different terms and structures,” Gamard says.

Today, Searchbox powers a single web application for the European Commission, where all such content is interlinked together. “So, if a researcher is looking at a grant, we suggest all the related relevant research grants, partnership opportunities across Europe, all previously funded projects, and all the information he or she needs,” says Gamard. “That’s done automatically so that, within a single look, within 5 minutes you can have identified all the research opportunities right for you.”

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Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine has announced that it is joining forces with Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to collaborate on schema.org. One article reports, “Now the pages tagged with Schema.org tags will be picked up not only by Yandex search engine, but also its other services, such as Yandex’s Business Directory, Yandex.Dictionaries, Yandex.Images and Yandex.Video. Yandex shows the data from these services also in its search results.” Read more