Abstract. Search engines are becoming such an easy way to find textual resources that we wish to use them also for multimedia content; however, syntactic techniques, even if promising, are not up to the task: future search engines must consider new approaches. In order to prove that Semantic Web technologies provide real benefits to end users in terms of an easier and more effective access to information, we designed and developed Squiggle, a Semantic Web framework that eases the deployment of semantic search engines. Following a model-driven approach to application development, Squiggle makes ontologies part of the running code. We evaluate the advantages of Squiggle against traditional approaches in real world deployments.