Why the Semantic Web is More Pipe Bomb than Pipe Dream

embought.com

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Pipe bomb in that when you hear about it you have the urge to call a bunch of men in padded jackets to safely defuse it? Yeah, I quite agree.

A small hint: If you were to draw a venn diagram of the internet, the intersection of the most syntactically and semantically correct pages and the most interesting pages would be very, very small indeed. Why on earth would search engines possibly give higher placement to pages with semantic markup? Their whole purpose is to locate the most useful content regardless of its format, hence Google indexes not only HTML documents but also word, PDF and plain text without hindrance or let. The second they start serving inferior results to serve a political agenda, that's the very second they start losing market share to their rivals.

Disagree. SearchMonkey suggests the future of search. It's how something like Mahalo can scale to the size of the internet. Because, as the author says, we use frameworks that can generate semantic info for us.

What irked me about this article is that the example given (arnold on mars movie) comes up with the "correct" top hit in Google. In other words, we're already there. Some pipe bomb.

Except that the "correct" link on Google is useless. If I search for a movie I want to watch it, if I search for a song I want to hear it, if I search for a book I want to read it. Sending me to informative pages can be useful but if I'm looking for an action I want an action to be my first result.

Really? I only want to watch a small percentage of the movies I search for. An "action" other than reading information is rarely my primary desire, and I have no idea how the semantic web will be able to intuit those cases.

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