Resumen
As the amount of data in the World Wide Web grows, the Internet becomes the biggest and often the primary information resource for many individuals and organizations. To make good use of the data, it is essential to provide effective and intelligent search capabilities. The users more and more often require direct and unambiguous answers, which are often not explicitly present in any document. The Web users also are not willing to learn complex query languages and need interfaces that will be easy to use and as close as possible to natural language. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the advantages that semantics brings to the users of contemporary Web search engines. The concepts of semantic Web and semantic search engines have been described along with some issues related to their development and usage, such as linked data, semantic query interfaces and the ways of publishing semantic data. The authors also explore the semantic features of contemporary search engines and indicate their future directions of development.