Barbara Starr
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Barbara Starr

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About Barbara Starr

Barbara Starr of SemanticFuse is a semantic strategist and software engineer, providing semantic SEO and other related consulting services. Starr is a technology expert and software designer specifically in the semantic search and semantic Web arenas. She worked as Principal Investigator for SAIC on the ARDA ACQUAINT program, which was the genesis for Watson at IBM. She also worked on the DARPA HPKB program, which was one of the precursors to the Semantic Web. She is the founder of the Semantic Web Meetup in San Diego, CA, as well as several other meetup groups. She is a governing board member of the Semantic Computing Consortium and is industry chair for IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing.

Barbara Starr's latest articles

Content

Use These Tools To See What Entities Are On A Web Page

Search engines leverage structured data to determine what entities are on your web page. They can also do this using other techniques such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. This article will introduce you to various tools that will help you identify entities on a web page. These tools include: Interesting /Chrome plugins/extensions […]

Ecommerce

Shopper FOMO – What Is It & Are You Dealing With It Appropriately?

FOMO, or “fear of missing out,” is something that is playing an increasingly significant role in today’s digitally connected world. Wikipedia defines it as follows: Fear of missing out or FOMO is a form of social anxiety — a compulsive concern that one might miss an opportunity for social interaction, a novel experience, profitable investment […]

Google

How To Use Entity Markup To Appear In The Knowledge Graph

Search engines have increasingly been incorporating elements of semantic search to improve some aspect of the search experience — for example, using schema.org markup to create enhanced displays in SERPs (as in Google’s rich snippets). Elements of semantic search are now present at almost all stages of the search process, and the Semantic Web has […]

Google

From 10 Blue Links To Entity SERPs: Is Your Website Ready?

Search is changing and along with it the landscape of search results. SERPs are more adaptive, more engaging, more informative, more interactive and more personalized. The adoption of Semantic Search- and Semantic Web-related enhanced displays in SERPs initially appeared via Yahoo and its SearchMonkey results. This was in due course followed by Google’s Rich Snippets […]

Google algorithm updates

Succeeding With Content In A Mobile World

In 2013, mobile traffic in the US almost doubled. Cyber Monday of 2013 was the year that cyber Monday went mobile. And, according to Gartner, Q2 of 2013 was the first time that sales of smartphones surpassed sales of feature phones, with the former accounting for 51.8 percent of mobile phone sales worldwide. That last fact […]

Google algorithm updates

5 Ways To Unlock The Benefits Of Semantic Search

Search is changing. It is now more personal, more engaging, more interactive and more predictive. SERPs no longer display just 10 blue links — they have become more useful and more visually appealing across all device types. Semantic search is at the forefront of these changes, as evidenced most recently by the launch of Google’s […]

Apple

Google Hummingbird: When Evolutionary Becomes Revolutionary

The announcement of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm last month made quite a stir in the tech and SEO communities. In a blog post released the same day as the Hummingbird announcement, Google revealed some new features and ended the post with this: We’ll keep improving Google Search so it does a little bit more of the hard […]

Google

10 Reasons Why Search Is In Vogue: Hot Trends In Semantic Search

Search is strongly featured in the all-important September issue of Vogue, which includes a 10-page layout of models wearing Google Glass, along with an in-depth feature on Yahoo CEO, Marissa Meyer, looking simply stunning and chic. Google Glass and the latest trends in search are now so hot that they are no longer considered geeky […]

Google

Used To Searching For Content? Now, Content Searches For You

When it comes to search, we are accustomed to queries that are initiated client-side and not server-side. But, Google Now and similar services are altering this long-standing trend. Search, by definition, implies user-initiated actions. How is this changed by technology such as Google Now and Google’s Knowledge Graph? First, what is Google Now? Available within the […]

Google

Leveraging Search Algorithms In A Semantic Search World

Innovation velocity in the search world is causing knowledge graphs to become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous. In light of that, it is imperative that semantic Web groups and SEO groups maintain a frequent and open communication. The SEO of the future will need to have a strong understanding of how knowledge graphs work — as well […]

Apple

Search, Answers & Knowledge Graphs Galore

Google is leveraging the knowledge graph brilliantly, while others have their own version of knowledge graph search. As the knowledge graph changes the SERPs, Google is pushing adoption of semantic technology, gradually replacing its traditional SERPs based on links. The search giant’s innovations are setting the pace for the future of search. For example, Google […]

Google

Google’s Hunger For Structured Markup

Google is keen for structured markup — to put it mildly. In the not-too-distant past, I wrote about Google’s Data Highlighter for event data, a tool which allows webmasters to indicate structured data for events without having to actually mark up the site’s HTML code. It has the charming feature that the resultant extracted data is […]

Facebook

Semantic & Graph-Based Search: The Future Face Of Search

In a June 2010 Semantic Web Meetup in San Diego, Peter Mika of Yahoo!’s research division gave a presentation entitled, “The future face of Search is Semantic for Facebook, Google and Yahoo!” As the title suggests, the presentation focused on the ever-growing use of semantic markup as a means for helping computers parse and understand […]

Facebook

Facebook Graph Search: The Good, The Bad, The UGLY!

Besides covering The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, we’ll also go into The How and The What of Facebook Graph Search, which launched in January 2013. Graph Search was hardly a surprise to many of us, yet its implementation to date has been interesting. If well-understood, it can be leveraged by marketers and brands; […]

Google Shopping

Is Google Hijacking Semantic Markup/Structured Data?

In 2012, I started a series, How The Major Search And Social Engines Are Using The Semantic Web, which took us to a point in time around September 2012. Since then, there have been further interesting developments. In this article, I am going to focus on recent developments that are search engine and/or Google specific, […]

Content

Examining Real World Uses Of Rich Snippets & Markup

Semantic markup is becoming more and more popular in conjunction with large scale SEO. Adding rich snippets to send rich signals to alert search engines as to the relevancy of your content − whatever vertical they may appear in − is not only a wise move, but an SEO best practice. Included below is an […]

Ecommerce

For Google Shopping & More, Vertical Search Works!

A Vertical Search engine, just for clarity’s sake, is defined as a search engine that focuses on a specific segment of Web content or on a specific topic. Examples would be Google Shopping and all the other items on the Google menu bar (Images, News, Recipes, Maps, YouTube, etc.). It is also clear that some […]

SEO

An Illustrated Guide To E-Commerce Markup Using GoodRelations

In How Search & Social Engines Are Using Semantic Search, I started this series with an overview. This article will give you a walk through on generating local and organization markup for a store. We will look at an alternative vocabulary, namely GoodRelations, and take a deeper dive into the specifics of generating semantic markup […]

SEO

How Search & Social Engines Are Using Semantic Search

The term “Semantic Search” is certainly not new. However, it has taken on a new dimension and implications in both search and social engines today. In addition, it has had a strong impact on targeted semantic advertising. This special series of forthcoming articles on semantic search will take a look at the history behind the […]

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