Semantic Web to Improve Search

Wall Street Journal calls Semantic Web the New Search Technology of the next decade.

New search technology created by Tim Berners Lee — one of the founders of the World Wide Web — called the "semantic Web," promises to make Internet searches vastly more efficient. Rather than troll through millions of sites for key words, search engines will read coding embedded in sites indicating specific meanings and categories, making it "easier for us to find out what [companies] are up to," says Bob Wyman, president of PubSub, a New York provider of persistent search technology. (Read more about PubSub and other persistent search providers.)

I am not sure whether I would call Semantic Web the "New Search technology". It can certainly make search better.
The financial community is already moving to XML. This is the first step, as XML Is a serialization format for the Semantic Web. The next step is to add semantics by layering RDF on top of this data. It will be an interesting decade to watch how this comes about.

Here are some resources on Semantic Web and related technologies.

Semantic Web: An Introduction

Semantic Web Road Map (one of the early papers I read about The Semantic Web)

W3C Semantic Web Activity

Planet RDF – One of the best resources on RDF, the language of the Semantic Web