
The announcement is seen as an attempt to persuade hitherto hesitant developers to tag data with the identifiers required to enable the use of semantic web technology. In order to take make the new indexing system viable, web developers will have to format sites with the new tags.
In a thinly veiled attack on Google, Amit Kumar, Yahoo's director of product management, said that Yahoo was committed to semantic web standards. He added that the average web user had not yet felt the full benefits of the technology "despite remarkable progress in the field".