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"Most surfers used two-word terms and made two attempts at a search before they either found what they wanted or gave up altogether." |
I’m not going to bother you with any hard statistics on the number of webpages that exist today. What’s the point? There’s a lot, a whole damned lot. And every day, webmasters create a thousand new ones.
With each new page, the whole web gets more complicated, more intricate. Finding one’s way on the net unassisted would be an impossible task. If there were no search engines already, we would have to invent them.
We do have search engines and at one time you could actually find stuff by using them.
Today, it’s become pretty difficult to get relevant results from a basic search. One part of that difficulty lies in the massive number of webpages. The other part is due to the inherent flaw common in SE algorithms. Current search engines only look for keywords and search terms. Your average SE will take the word(s) that you submit and scan the pages within its index and return results based on ambivalent factors such as whether or not a certain webpage contains those words in its BODY, TITLE or META tags. Whereas each SE incorporates a unique algorithm formula, most of them operate on this fairly unsophisticated method for finding content on a webpage.
While adult webmasters have alternative sources for traffic other than the search engines, we still need and desire SE hits. We want our sites to appear on first page, SE results. We want SE users to locate us because the SE visitor is a proactive visitor. The search engine surfer is arduously looking for us and we need them to be able to find us.
Webmasters create sites based entirely on this interdependency between surfer/SE/webmaster. For a page to rank high on an SE, practically every element of it has to scream KEYWORD or SEARCH TERM. The result of this is the preponderance of irrelevant results one receives when using one of today’s search engine services. Webmasters spend too much time making pages based on search terms and not enough time on making bookmark-worthy sites. More than often, the top ten results from a simple keyword search contain mostly worthless links.
Surfers already know this. They also already know that the links listed after the first page results are complete crap and in a recent study “Web Search: Public Searching of the Web” there was research to back up that reality. According to the study, most surfers used two-word terms and made two attempts at a search before they either found what they wanted or gave up altogether.
As time goes by and the number of web sites triple and quadruple, the common SE search will become useless. We need a new way to search for the sake of both surfers and webmasters. If not, all of us will be forced to depend on paid-link portals and advertising to navigate our travels on the Internet. Web users will be at the mercy of moneychangers.
To the rescue: Tim Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web.
If the name Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t ring a bell, it should. In 1989, Berners-Lee proposed and implemented a project incorporating the sharing of hypertext documents over cyberspace. It was called the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee created the first server and the first client. He went on to produce the web’s foremost standards body -the World Wide Web Consortium- better known as the W3C. For all he’s done for the web and the world, Berners-Lee is a relatively young man and he has a lot of plans for the future of his baby. One plan is called the Semantic Web.
There are pages and pages of text that explain the ontology and language of the Semantic Web. You can study everything about this project by visiting the WC3 at:
For a better understanding of the need for a Semantic Web, I refer to text taken directly from the W3C:
"Tell me what wines I should buy to serve with each course of the following menu. And, by the way, I don't like Sauternes.
It would be difficult today to construct a Web agent that would be capable of performing a search for wines on the Web that satisfied this query. Similarly, consider actually assigning a software agent the task of making a coherent set of travel arrangements. (For more use cases see the OWL requirements document.) To support this sort of computation, it is necessary to go beyond keywords and specify the meaning of the resources described on the Web. This additional layer of interpretation captures the semantics of the data.”
To wit, the Semantic Web will search for websites based not on keywords but on the meaning behind the keywords.
The way search is now, if you type the term “porn psychology” in an SE box, you’ll probably get a results page filled with links to sites where the webmaster added those two words to their BODY text and/or META tags. If you’re lucky, one or two results will be links to an actual article on porn psychology or most likely a link to some book for sale on Amazon.com. The other 75,000 links will be junk.
With a Semantic Search, the programming language used will be more similar to Artificial Intelligence. The language (Web Ontology Language or OWL) looks for more than just words. It looks for the relationship between words. The Semantic Web will search deeper, past data into the “data about data” or METADATA. A Semantic Search will look for data about a site as opposed to a word-based search.
The Semantic Web really isn’t that confusing and in the second part of this two-part article I’ll give you examples of how it works. The fact is this isn’t future science. Many popular websites already supply surfers with searching variations of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is coming and some say it’s already here. As an adult webmaster, you ought to be ready.
** Click Here For: Searching With Semantics! - Part #2
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