Yet again, Yahoo! has impressed and surprised the world by adopting the Semantic Web. Yahoo! had been announcing about expanding Open Search Platform and letting third parties to alter and enhance search results with structured data that may be useful to users.

With semantic web standards like RDFs and microformats Yahoo should be able to deliver better, faster and reliable search results to the users. In return, their market share will rise due to the significant amount of traffic in Yahoo Search. Yahoo will mark up and index semantic data (RDF and Microformats) third party’s sites and perform a search into them. This allows third party to add any RDF properties that can be found to an ordinary HTML pages, be it a blog post via CMS or other.

The second aspect is displaying the information to a searcher. After having the data in the search engine, it should be showed it in search results in a useful way.

An example on using semantic web would be marking up RDF and microformats to social media such that search engine could understand the content and relationships between pieces of content and deliver the result in an intelligent manner in the Yahoo search.

Yahoo plans to support a number of microformats at the start: hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom and XFN. They will support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others. They will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, Yahoo will support the Amazon A9 OpenSearch specification with extensions for structured queries to deep web data.