Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results?

In what appears to us to be a new addition to many Google search results pages, queries about birth dates, family connections and other information are now being responded to with explicitly semantic structured information. Who is Bill Clinton's wife? What's the capital city of Oregon? What is Britney Spears' mother's name? The answers to these and other factual questions are now displayed above natural search results in Google and the information is structured in the traditional subject-predicate-object format, or "tripples," of semantic web parlance.
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The answers aren't found structured that way on the web pages they come from - Google appears to be parsing the semantic structure from semi or unstructured data. That's something Microsoft paid over $100 million to try to do this summer when it acquired Powerset. Check out these screen shots below.



We're sure that Google's been doing this analysis for some time behind the scenes, but for the company to expose the data in this structured way and to include a link to view other sources appears new to everyone we've asked about it so far. We've got inquiries in with some people who specialize in search but our semantic web contacts say they've not seen it before. (Update:

Our first comment comes from someone who claims this has been the case for years already! We'll see how feedback goes.)

It appears that the feature isn't being bucket tested, either, it is globally available. Could 3rd parties make use of the data now that it's available in a structured format? Possibly. The search results pages aren't being marked up in HTML, which is a shame.

Yahoo, Ask.com and Live.com are all unable to answer these questions so clearly.

Many of the data points are being pulled in from the structured part of Wikipedia entries, which is interesting. Other sources are wide ranging, from a license plate website to Jason Calacanis's Mahalo.

We're not sure what to make of this - have readers seen it before? We think it's new and we think it's pretty interesting.

Why is This Important?

As we've said about the semantic web before: Once our software is capable of deriving meaning from web pages it looks at for us, there's a whole lot of work that will already be done, allowing our human, creative minds to reach new heights. Structured data is a layer of standardized abstraction upon which new innovation can be created.

That's why we're interested to see what Google is doing.

The answers aren't always accurate - try searching the birth date of Jesus Christ, for example. Yahoo! has far more clearly articulated what they intend to do with semantic data. None the less, Google now appears to be doing something that no one else is doing. Maybe readers here search for "Britney Spears' mother" all the time, though, and have already seen this. It's new to us, though.

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BY Marshall Kirkpatrick
Source：ReadWriteWeb