Semantic search seems to be an elusive and fuzzy target to IR, SW and NLP researchers. One reason is that this challenge lies in between all those fields, which implies a broad scope of issues and tech- nologies that must be mastered. In this extended abstract we survey the work of Yahoo! Research at Barcelona to approach this problem. Our research is intended to produce a virtuous feedback circuit by using ma- chine learning for capturing semantics, and, ultimately, for better search.