It’s not the key to flying cars, and perhaps we also can’t count on it to provide clean energy or miracle cures.  The development of semantic search is of huge importance to search companies, advertisers, and the average user, however, so a session of the same name addressed the question of "Semantic Search: How Will it Change Our Lives?"

(Coverage of SES Chicago continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

 Nagaraju Bandaru

Nagaraju Bandaru, the cofounder and CTO of BooRah, kicked things off by pointing out that semantic search is already increasing the relevance of search results; both search engines and users are embracing it.  His company uses metadata to make improvements.

Kathleen Dahlgren, the founder and CTO of Cognition Technologies, then stepped in to mention specific areas targeted for improvement including tokenization, morphology, parsing, and formal semantics.  "We want to go into the natural language processing," she said.  "We want to take search technology down to word sense."

This means search engines would be more easily able to distinguish between, say, a strike on the head, a workers’ strike, striking a match, and striking out.

Tim Musgrove, the founder and CEO of TextDigger, believes that using natural tags to denote similar concepts will lead to real improvements.  Yet he allowed, "Semantic search will change our lives, but it will not happen overnight."

Scott Prevost, Microsoft’s principal development manager of Live Search/Powerset, agreed, "Search has a long way to go."  He feels keyword techniques involve only a shallow representation of documents’ meaning and users’ intent.

Larry Cornett, Yahoo’s vice president of consumer products, had at least a few good things to say about the direction SearchMonkey is taking, though.  Experimental enhancements have it applying structured data and rich content and giving users and publishers control.