The Semantic Web & Search

Friday, February 22, 2008 By Clay | Comments (0)

Bernard Lunn at ReadWriteWeb writes an excellent post on the semantic web entitled 11 Things To Know About The Semantic Web. If you’re a search marketer (paid or organic) and you’re not familiar with the emerging semantic web than you’ve got some reading to do.

Bernard touches on the decline of relational databases, the impact on Google, and what the killer app will or will not look like. Here are my thoughts on where he’s dead-on and where he may have missed it:

5. Don’t look for a killer app. That implies a client/consumer win. This is much more likely to be a server/platform/enterprise win. Even if the initial experimentation is done in the consumer domain; Freebase for example looks like a mass Beta test for some enterprise technology that Metaweb wants to release later.

The killer apps are out there. Trust me. Some are in development, some are in the wild, and some are just waiting for the enabling power of the semantic web. I know Alex Iskold would argue it’s in its infancy and well positioned for the emergence of the semantic web.

7. Semantic Web could slow the Google steamroller. This could be like the PC for IBM or the Web for Microsoft. The steamroller’s momentum carries it forward for a very long time and it can build all kinds of wrapper systems around it, but something new always does come along. Google mastered how to give some structure to countless unstructured HTML pages. Semantic Web will gradually make that less critical as the underlying content will be more structured. These big generational changes - mainframe to PC to Web - seem to be happening faster, so it seems about time for another big generational change to start happening.

Google is well positioned for the semantic web. Their algo’s are just salivating for more contextual data and their toolbar (among other tools) will evolve to provide further structure to the quasi-unstructured web. Google will face some new competition but they’re in a tremendous position for this evolution. See vertical search below.

8. But don’t look for Yet Another Search Engine (YASE) to be the David to Google’s Goliath. Just like PC was not another mainframe and Web was not another PC. Don’t ask me precisely what it will look like; if I did know I would have to kill you if I told you. I just know what it won’t look like.

I agree completely. I have a hunch what it will look like and I think it will strike Google by changing user behavior. I’ll elaborate on this when the time is right

9. Vertical Search is the pragmatist’s Semantic Web. Vertical Search businesses use whatever techniques they need - basic search engines, scrapers, APIs, human editors - to create some meaningful/useful structure in a single domain. Over time these cobbled together pragmatic solutions will be replaced by a semantic web platform, probably by an API that enables human editors to leverage their valuable domain expertise.

A fantastic point that’s often overlooked. Google looks for scalable solutions and today’s vertical search engines are very difficult to scale (across verticals). The semantic web will allow Google to build scalable apps in all kinds of verticals.

10. Tagging is the quietly disruptive technology. Everybody tags. It is the most basic human urge to mark what we find. We do it with Folders in Windows. We do it online with Bookmarks. Specialist tag Microformats such as Hcard and Hcalendar add more structure and we are only at the very start of this wave.

Another great observation. Fred Wilson pleaded with the Delicious team not to sell out and create a next generation search engine based on tagging. While Yahoo has started the integration process by displaying Delicious data in their SERPs there have been no indications the data is being used as a ranking factor.

11. Semantic Web will leverage the “community” to add structure and this will use some techniques from first generation Social Networking. But it is very unlikely that Semantic Web will emerge from the walled gardens of current social networking sites. The winners will know how to motivate community to provide structure and will provide the tools that make the structuring so easy that nobody knows they are doing anything so boring as structuring. That is the big lesson from Web 2.0 that will be applied in the Semantic Web.

Right on but an application must exist that allows the community to connect & communicate outside of their primary destination. This will come.

What are your thoughts?

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