Digital Thoughts – Google Casts A Semantic Web
Many of have wondered what the future has in store for Google. Will they become the next Microsoft – an enormous profit machine embedded into our lives and directly controlling how many of us compute? Might Google, today’s high flier whose stock has almost tripled since going public last year wind up more like a Sun Microsystems. While many of us have wondered this, Paul Ford, frequent NPR commentator and freelance technologist wrote a piece called, “August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web.” What makes this article appealing is, among other things, the authors extrapolations. Even more appealing is that it was written almost three years ago before Google challenged Overture for dominance in the paid ad market and made billionaires and multi-millionaires out of a number of employees.
I began using Google consistently in 1998, just after reading an article about the brand new search engine with the funny name. Since then, I have been loathe to use another engine. It gave the results most relevant to me at the time and did so almost altruistically. In many ways I am reminded of that feeling when I recently visited HousingMaps.com, an ingenious service that combines one of the coolest technologies – Google Maps – with one of the most, almost unexplainably, popular services – Craigslist. Here, you can see all listings as they relate to one another. It provides a way of accessing information clearly that had previously seemed indigestible.
Among the Internet success stories, eBay commands a top billing. The site, one of the least attractive and least changed since its inception, makes money. So much, so that it could afford the billion dollar price tag for payment facilitator PayPal. Notable among its achievements include being able to effectively outsource all content creation. eBay merely provides a framework for which buyers and sellers can access each other in a scale not possible without the internet. The combination of existing technology and their framework sparked a hyper-growth business that effectively took itself out of the picture with respect to that growth. If you build it, they will come, and keep it open so that they can come.
As strong as eBay is, Google has grown to become one of the dominant forces online, whose buzz often exceeds rival Yahoo and MSN. Why Google has such a large following with which it has built an even larger business might have to do with its understanding, better than anyone else to date, the “Semantic Web.” The Semantic Web as Paul Ford points out “isn’t about pages or links, it’s about the relationships between things – whether one thing is a part of another, or how much a thing costs, or when it happened.” The raw web certainly is a wild mess of pages and links; a semantic layer can help make sense of it all. The human brain does a fantastic job of deciphering meaning (semantics) from syntax (structure). Computers have a much harder time inferring actual meaning. They can process incredibly fast and handle incredible amounts of data, but that doesn’t equal meaning.
No company appears to have cracked the code to the semantic web, just as Paul Ford’s article reference technologies offered by Google that do not exist yet. But, what separates Google from many (Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo for instance) is the amount of data they not only can, but also do, process. Understanding the web requires data, massive amounts of data. Each data point helps paint a picture of some other data point and together they can lead to meaning. Without that data, a company will struggle to provide meaningful results to user searches. All of the top sites today appear to have a key portion of their business based around providing relevant information. The company that does it best can out-compete all others.
The future of Google and what it will look like next year, five years, or twenty years makes for great intellectual exercise. The not so distant future of how one might use Google can be seen today when using their local search. You can type in “sushi” and “San Francisco” to see a list and map of restaurants, or you type in “category: Restaurant Japanese” and “San Francisco” to view the data from a more distributed level. When we type “sushi,” Google interprets that as being a part of the category. By typing in “pizza,” Google offers the option to filter results by only pizza restaurants or all. It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to see Google as more than just a search box but a powerful tool, one that could compete directly with Amazon and eBay in the not too distant future.
While today we aren’t directly seeing the benefits of the Semantic Web, we will. Someone will figure out more than search but also how to clean up the current search environment where an incredible amount of noise makes finding certain types of information nearly impossible. In the future we’ll be able to direct a Google to find us what we need rather than modifying the way we speak so that we can comb through results. At the moment, that looks like Google, but we’ll see.
