Semantics. What does it mean? - Part 2

One of the great benefits of a semantic web will be semantic search. As semantic web and semantic search are just in their infant stages, what the words actually mean themselves are still slightly ambiguous.

A good analogy to describe the semantic search is when one person talks to another person. When I talk to my friend, I can ask him, "What do cows produce?" His answer will be "milk". My friend is able to answer the question with information because he understood the meaning of my question. He used his brain, which already knew the association between cows and milk, to give the answer.

The current web mostly uses keyword search which is based on syntax, so instead of understanding my question, all it will do is try to match the keywords with the tags on a web page. The problem with this is that it just scans the internet for web pages with the tag "cows", then for web pages with the word "produce". What I end up with is a whole heap of data which I have to sift through myself to find the information that I want. One of the problems with Web 2.0 is that there is just too much content. Semantic web will overcome this problem by understanding the data on a web page similar as a person would, and this will enable me to acquire the information I am seeking without having to process all the data.

This video is an advertisement for semantic search engine optimisation, but it helps to give us some insight into semantic search and how it will affect business.

Another aspect of semantic search is disambiguation. Words often have multiple meanings, and people usually infer the correct meaning by looking at the word in context. With the current web that uses keyword search, a search word can sometimes return an incorrect result. For example if I search "What bands do people listen to?", the current key word search engine might possibly return results for rubber bands or headbands. A semantic search on the other hand will look at the context of the word band and see that it only refers to music bands. This will increase the accuracy of the search and reduce the number of irrelevant results that would waste time.

So what do you think of semantic search? Will it radically change the way we search? or is it just an over hyped minor advancement of the web?