Information search: the semantic and the aggregated

March 13th, 2008 by Taly Weiss

Filed under information, internet behavior, search, semantic

data overload Information search: the semantic and the aggregated

Way back in 1994 two Stanford PhD candidates Jerry & David found it little unwieldy to manage their own brewed list of favorite links. They visited and categorized 1,000 web sites a day ,eventually they broke them out into categories, then subcategories and created the first hierarchical organization of Web sites “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. Which later became “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” or Yahoo ! ..today, one of the most coveted property on web. Internet was all about not even a million pages that time. Yahoo! emerged in response to a perceived need, i.e., organize and categorize the growing proliferation of information on the Web.
Today, Yahoo! announced they are taking it one step ahead, embracing few standards of the semantic web (RDF and microformats for a start). Expanding their Open Search Platform and adding third parties- clearly means that soon we will be able to go deeper inside the web.
Great news indeed. We are about to have better and smarter means to explore.
According to Netcraft survey today’s web holds around 158,209,426 sites. Thanks to Yahoo! we will soon be able to refine our search and receive more relevant information.

But until Yahoo!, Google or other will be able to really learn our interests, how will we reach the information we need?
Can well – selected information provide an answer to our needs?
Guy Kawasaki calls to make it simple as he launches a new website, Alltop, mapping the best selected information sources, categorizing them and handing it as simple as one can expect.

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