Red Herring published at the beggining of April an article called "First Semantic Search Engine?" The technology business newspaper is asking an essential question on the future of this market : Are the newcomers, such as Zoominfo or Reportlinker, the first ever semantic search engine ?
The answer is YES ! The new vertical search engine structures open access information already on the web, which is a true revolution. Industry leaders, such as Google and Yahoo are able to offer you the broadest database of results (12 Billion pages ??).... But soon, only search engine experts will be able to find out what they are looking for in this mountains of data, even if experts agree to say that Google is probably already using semantic technologies to improve quality of its results.
So basically, the first benefit to the use of semantic search engine is time sparing. That's definitely good news for CEO's ! Actually, time spending on research over the Internet for business purpose increased by 40 % between 2001 and 2006, Outsell Inc said. And this is time that professsionals won't use for analysis and decision purpose. To summarize, getting more information makes you less efficient.
This point of view is shared by a research team from Wright State University in Ohio. Developing a semantic search engine technology, the team is working on usage in the Healthcare industry, but also terrorism, defense, and financial services.
The strenght of this new generation of search engine is to allow users to identify information described in another way than they formulated it in their query : - HR professionals will identify best applicants - Doctor will idenitify potential danger of medecine usage - Information professionals will easily get open access industry reports.