Semantic Suggestion

New Search “Signage” Fills the Gap Between Now and Later

On 9/28 the Hakia blog post stirred the pot of interesting semantic web issues–my essential takeway: are we at a point in which we are technologically mature enough to handle SW, or are our behaviors and satisfactions attached to technology (current search engines) too rooted to the Now?

Dr. Berkan proposes that SW is not an “if” but a “when” an undeniable force in the evolution of search.

This got me thinking about a couple current search tools that offer a wide range of semantic suggestion, search add-ons that point in the direction of SW:

• Keyword search suggestion has been offering syntactic, sometimes clumsy semantic suggestions for awhile now–you start typing a word in the search box and a drop down menu offers increasingly granular suggestions with each passing keystroke–can be quite distracting, but seriously indicative of the wild assortment of search terms people use. Maybe we will reminisce about it someday–it’ll become an ancient and primitive syntactic tool–like cave hieroglyphics (though some would likely argue for the sophistication of hieroglyphics).

• Answer Tips, from Answer.com. I just experienced a webpage enabled with Answer Tips. I can double click on any word on the page and get a spam-free pop-up window from Answer.com that defines, describes, and otherwise offers a range of encyclopedic and dictionary reference–for ANY WORD ON THE PAGE.

• Hakia’s ScoopBar makes it possible to semantically manage data. It involves downloading to the Firefox browser, but promises highlighted webpage text, and the Scoop tool allows users to save results in offline folders accessible later. This is a bit like Google Notebooks, but in an offline format. (I have not used ScoopBar yet, and I’m curious b/c I’ve tried G Notebooks on a couple occasions to see if I could find a more convenient and intuitive way to corral a lot of research data. But the task has just seemed more cumbersome than convenient.) So ScoopBar semantically manages, semantic results.

• Google Maps allow users to personalize–overlay data in various formats that can be accessed via place markers. Click or mouseover a map placemarker and a pop-up data window opens like a new stratosphere of semantic information relative to a geographic location. G Maps can be made public, usable by the wider web search audience.

One syntactic foot in front of the semantic other.