Yahoo Geeks Out Over Semantic Search

One word may have two different meanings, depending on the context of their usage. Yahoo hopes to find the key in search that enables its engine to understand the difference.

Does orange mean a fruit or a color? The word ‘bass’ could be a tasty fish or a rocking musical instrument. When it comes to the written word, people enjoy a vast advantage over a computer, as we easily pull the context out of the text to understand the meaning of the word.

Yahoo Search wants to enable such semantic recognition in their engine. Despite the much-discussed travails on the advertising side, the tech side of Yahoo Search seems a livelier place, especially with the recent unveiling of BOSS, their opening of the index to all developers.

Impediments lay in the roadway to better semantic search. Yahoo’s Peter Mika listed an assortment of them at Devx:

It is almost impossible to return search results that relate to the secondary sense of a term