9 ms·

Google exec challenges Berners-Lee (2006)

91 points by ColinWright 5y ago

oh_sigh 5y ago
Well, it looks like Norvig won that fight. Now I guess the question is was Norvig prescient or did his reluctance to get involved in the semantic web given his position of power set the mood for google and the other big players?
- warkdarrior 5y ago
  What's really going to bake your noodle is, did Norvig launch massive multi-year campaigns of spamming and misinformation on the Internet to prove his point and win over Berners-Lee?
- wmf 5y ago
  The Semantic Web didn't need any help dying; very few people were ever interested in it.
- Arnavion 5y ago
  "Won" in that the average website's not using RDF, yes. "Won" in that Google's doing a better job than RDF could, no. https://i.imgur.com/UkcR945.png https://i.imgur.com/UkcR945.png ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622613 )
  - cowmoo728 5y ago
    There are some really funny ones. https://i.imgur.com/K7GdKKY.png https://i.imgur.com/K7GdKKY.png https://i.redd.it/tucvzslvh3151.png https://i.redd.it/tucvzslvh3151.png ^ the grass one is because lawns became a popular fashion statement in the 17th century, but still. https://i.redd.it/yjclt3q9nh111.jpg https://i.redd.it/yjclt3q9nh111.jpg
    - amscanne 5y ago
      The second is actually a decent example of where the semantic web would probably fail because of the imprecision, but Google has succeeded to some degree. “When was grass invented” has no good answer because it’s a stupid question. You could interpret this as “when was grass discovered” but I suspect this is not the question being asked. Google has interpreted this as “when was the grass lawn invented”, which is probably what the user was actually asking. In both cases, the results are actually great (my first link was to the Wikipedia Lawn article).
      - Cybiote 5y ago
        I don't think it's a stupid question, just oddly phrased (more on that later). I think there are two stable interpretations. "When did grass evolve" or "when were grass lawns invented". Later: Why isn't it an obviously stupid question? Because I think the accompanying "who (or what) invented grass" is validly answered as "by evolution". I feel the act of invention requires no intentionality and is simply the output of learning processes where generated artifacts have material and dynamic properties embodying deep knowledge of physical laws and help achieve some goal relative to an environment. Evolution learns in the sense that the mathematics of natural selection mirror that of bayesian filters.
  - google234123 5y ago
    "nvidia 2080 number of cuda core" works
- lemmsjid 5y ago
  I wouldn't think Norvig won the fight. In fact, Google has been part of the charge to make it typical for federated content sites to provide structured data. For example, Google "recipe for pumpkin pie". You will see a bunch of recipes from a variety of sites. Go to one of them, and you'll see markup for schema.org's Recipe class (https://schema.org/Recipe https://schema.org/Recipe). A ton of Google's structured search results are powered by this. Norvig's concerns were valid, and over the years they have largely been overcome by a combination of tooling (CMS systems automatically emitting structured data alongside HTML) and incentivization (emitting structured data allowing one's site to be included in Google's structured search results).
bravogamma 5y ago
In reading this article, I found myself first completely agreeing with Berners-Lee, and then, completely agreeing with Norvig. I would love to see Berners-Lee vision come to life; however, I am not sure how to overcome the human vice elements Norvig is talking about.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  This is where editorial judgement comes in. It could either be highly centralized with Google or another search engine providing the curation. Or it could be farmed out using PKI, similar to how extended verification was done back in the day, except the verification is more encompassing of “human vice” and serves as a feedback signal for the search engine.
- echelon 5y ago
  > The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, 'I'm the leader. Why should I standardize?' This is the reason. The only reason. Google was the leader in this story. Google built infrastructure and intelligence to handle Norvig's other concerns: provenance and validity. It's not perfect, but it's good enough, and it's a major competitive advantage. Why would they want everyone on the internet to have Google powers at low cost? Wikipedia solves for these concerns. Open source does too. There's no reason we couldn't have had maintainers and curators and a distributed web of pubkey signing to vouch for good data. Most of the data would have been social by nature anyway, and sharing news and articles p2p would have been an early take at the fediverse. But broader than just the Twitter focus. Google launched the WHATWG partially to supplant the W3C and their semantic web push. They knee-capped XHTML and its strong semantics in favor of a loosely typed, messy, and forgiving HTML5. Because Google is one of only a few players that can deduce the semantics on their own. (They then pushed ahead unilaterally so that Chrome was dominant. They fashion the web into an image that suits them.) The Semantic Web would have threatened Google by lowering the barrier to entry to parties that wanted to connect and query data. Of course Google hates it.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    HTML5 does have a fully-supported XML representation, there's no regression from XHTML. And Google themselves are working with schema.org to provide standards that endow web pages with strong semantics, along a semantic-web model - this is basically what's powering "rich" SERP results in Google and other search engines. That doesn't look like they "hate" the semantic web all that much.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
This was in 2006. In 2002 I had lunch with Peter and when I mentioned the Semantic Web, he was not enthusiastic. I would argue that today Google’s Knowledge Graph, DBPedia, and WikiData are all successful projects.
- bawolff 5y ago
  True, but i feel like central repos like wikidata are quite a bit different from the original vision of many small websites all interoperating into a semantic web. Then again the same thing happened with the normal web. We have wikipedia instead of thousands of people writing articles on their personal homepages.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - wibagusto 5y ago
    What is IPFS though if not a glimpse of the future? Distributed makes more sense to me and P2P concepts are being heavily researched with all the blockchain hoo-ha!
    - bawolff 5y ago
      A proof-of-concept that's generated a lot of buzz but not a lot in terms of concrete or unique usage?
  - mulmen 5y ago
    But Wikipedia isn't a primary source and presumably it could (and does) link out to those personal sites.
    - teh_klev 5y ago
      Unfortunately you then run into "reliable sources" and "notability" battles with other wikipedians over citing personal websites.
gorgoiler 5y ago
Web … incompetence … PHP … profit … I don’t know much about semantic search. But. PHP is the success story of the Internet and it is the complete opposite of perfection. Go figure.
- bawolff 5y ago
  As the unix people say, "worse is better".
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Another way of looking at "worse is better" is observing that, while "worse" delivers some results sooner, it also sucks out the oxygen from the room, preventing "better" from ever happening. Iterate it a few times, building one "worse" thing on another "worse" thing, and it's not hard to see why our whole tech stacks are so bad.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      I'll still take code that works in practise over code that works in theory, any day. Turning an idea into practise is not easy and often involves lots of edge cases nobody ever talks about because they aren't the "interesting" part of the solution. I suspect people overestimate how workable some of these theoretically better systems are in reality.
rektide 5y ago
> "What I get a lot is: 'Why are you against the Semantic Web?' I am not against the Semantic Web. But from Google's point of view, there are a few things you need to overcome, incompetence being the first,. . . We deal with millions of Web masters who can't configure a server, can't write HTML. It's hard for them to go to the next step." Thankfully we have a bit more practice writing HTML today. Rdfa & microdata are both fine markup formats for html that are not hard to understand. Rdfa first got semi-started in 2004, & honestly, was not that challenging. More code-centric systems also have JSON-LD as an option, which is fairly simple to author. What concerns me most though is that Norvig seems to be arguing a strong case of worse-is-better, claiming that since some people will find semantic web difficult to publish, it's not worth doing at all. That we could be creating value, that we could be making information more rich is not of interest: the focus is on the downsides, is on creating an image of unsuccess, unpossibility. It's a dissapointing framing & difficult to try to move a conversation forward past this low bogland Norvig sets up. > "The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, 'I'm the leader. Why should I standardize?'" Today Google is a primary instigator/driver of schema.org, along with Microsoft Yahoo, and Yandex. I'd say Google is the best evidence this hard problem wasn't really so hard. Also, there are other perfectly good ontologies out there that also coexist. > "The third problem is one of deception. We deal every day with people who try to rank higher in the results" Again a problem specific to Google. Semantic web doesn't have to be the authoritative source of truth & 100% accurate to start to add value to the world, to make the information on the page meaningful & semantic. But again Norvig is applying his specific demands to the Semantic Web, & making an incredibly high bar. --- The page has been a glossy synthetic produced whole object-artifact for a long time now. I for one continue to hope we can do what the semantic web promised: start to break down the things on the page, to define the page in terms of a construction of a bunch of different, individual, meaningful objects. I don't think truly empowering information & augmenting people (in this semantic web style) is compatible with the mission statement of a company whose goal has been to "organize and make available the world's information," since such a company would be less needed if the information were better able to present & make available itself. Norvig was taking down a huge threat, and one that indeed is not particularly helpful to his cause.
- bawolff 5y ago
hendry 5y ago
WHO REMEMBERS XHTML?
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
I remember reading about of projects, that were trying to extract ontology data from wikipedia. Does anyone know, if these efforts were successful?
- easton 5y ago
  Wikidata was the most successful one, its data is used for Google's knowledge cards and the Siri cards that pop up if you use the Look Up feature in iOS. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
  - Vinnl 5y ago
    DBPedia was the one that extracted from Wikipedia; Wikidata is the community curating the data from the ground up (with the goal of importing them into Wikipedia - i.e. the data flows in the opposite direction).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
arpit 5y ago
Interestingly Google today does support (a subset of) Microdata embedded in HTML within Gmail, Google Assistant and Search. Much simpler than the complex constructs of the Semantic Web as originally conceived though.
arthurcolle 5y ago
"He said the next stage of the Web is about making data accessible for artificial intelligence to locate and analyze." Meanwhile, in reality: "F* it, we'll do it live!" with a bit of "hmm what it we add more layers"
musicale 5y ago
Now former Google exec.
- paganel 5y ago
  That's a TIL for me, apparently it all happened pretty recently [1]. I would have expected that to be on HN as a dedicated post when it happened, or maybe I just missed it. [1] https://fudzilla.com/news/ai/53689-novig-leaves-google-for-stanford https://fudzilla.com/news/ai/53689-novig-leaves-google-for-s...
  - pronoiac 5y ago
    There was a post here, and he corrected it: > "Joins Stanford HAI" is correct; "Leaves Google" is not right–I'm keeping my Google badge, but will spend most of my time at Stanford. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28836275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28836275
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
andyjohnson0 5y ago
I'd like to agree with tbl, but I have a nagging feeling that semantic web is a bit like Ted Nelson's ideas for Xanadu: somehow too neat and tidy, wheras the web has been successful despite that. At internet scale the semantic graph is going to have to emerge from automated, deductive effort. There aren't enough people, and there isn't enough human attention or appropriate reward systems, to bring about a widespread semantic web by building metadata librarian-style. I wish it were otherwise.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mrkramer 5y ago
But why Google isn't automating the process? They could suggest webmasters what metadata to put or Google could create metadata themselves.
1shooner 5y ago
I've never seen these two approaches as necessarily in opposition. Yes, search engines can and probably should use proprietary algorithms to derive semantic meaning, relationships, and credibility, but we can also have a more expressive semantic medium to create that content, and give authors more agency when being evaluated by those algorithms. It does not have to be a binary choice between Google black-box and endless viagra spam. Today Google does consume all sorts of structured data. With low/no code web publishing tools, incompetence is not really a blocker.
jhbadger 5y ago
I think calling Peter Norvig "a Google executive" (yes, I know that's the title of the article being linked to) is a great disservice to him. Yes, he worked at Google for a time, but he wasn't some beancounter -- he's an extremely accomplished computer science researcher both in academia and industry.

91 points by ColinWright 5y ago

Well, it looks like Norvig won that fight. Now I guess the question is was Norvig prescient or did his reluctance to get involved in the semantic web given his position of power set the mood for google and the other big players?

warkdarrior 5y ago
What's really going to bake your noodle is, did Norvig launch massive multi-year campaigns of spamming and misinformation on the Internet to prove his point and win over Berners-Lee?
wmf 5y ago
The Semantic Web didn't need any help dying; very few people were ever interested in it.
Arnavion 5y ago
"Won" in that the average website's not using RDF, yes. "Won" in that Google's doing a better job than RDF could, no. https://i.imgur.com/UkcR945.png https://i.imgur.com/UkcR945.png ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622613 )
- cowmoo728 5y ago
  There are some really funny ones. https://i.imgur.com/K7GdKKY.png https://i.imgur.com/K7GdKKY.png https://i.redd.it/tucvzslvh3151.png https://i.redd.it/tucvzslvh3151.png ^ the grass one is because lawns became a popular fashion statement in the 17th century, but still. https://i.redd.it/yjclt3q9nh111.jpg https://i.redd.it/yjclt3q9nh111.jpg
  - amscanne 5y ago
    The second is actually a decent example of where the semantic web would probably fail because of the imprecision, but Google has succeeded to some degree. “When was grass invented” has no good answer because it’s a stupid question. You could interpret this as “when was grass discovered” but I suspect this is not the question being asked. Google has interpreted this as “when was the grass lawn invented”, which is probably what the user was actually asking. In both cases, the results are actually great (my first link was to the Wikipedia Lawn article).
    - Cybiote 5y ago
      I don't think it's a stupid question, just oddly phrased (more on that later). I think there are two stable interpretations. "When did grass evolve" or "when were grass lawns invented". Later: Why isn't it an obviously stupid question? Because I think the accompanying "who (or what) invented grass" is validly answered as "by evolution". I feel the act of invention requires no intentionality and is simply the output of learning processes where generated artifacts have material and dynamic properties embodying deep knowledge of physical laws and help achieve some goal relative to an environment. Evolution learns in the sense that the mathematics of natural selection mirror that of bayesian filters.
- google234123 5y ago
  "nvidia 2080 number of cuda core" works
lemmsjid 5y ago
I wouldn't think Norvig won the fight. In fact, Google has been part of the charge to make it typical for federated content sites to provide structured data. For example, Google "recipe for pumpkin pie". You will see a bunch of recipes from a variety of sites. Go to one of them, and you'll see markup for schema.org's Recipe class (https://schema.org/Recipe https://schema.org/Recipe). A ton of Google's structured search results are powered by this. Norvig's concerns were valid, and over the years they have largely been overcome by a combination of tooling (CMS systems automatically emitting structured data alongside HTML) and incentivization (emitting structured data allowing one's site to be included in Google's structured search results).

bravogamma 5y ago

In reading this article, I found myself first completely agreeing with Berners-Lee, and then, completely agreeing with Norvig. I would love to see Berners-Lee vision come to life; however, I am not sure how to overcome the human vice elements Norvig is talking about.

jdavis703 5y ago
This is where editorial judgement comes in. It could either be highly centralized with Google or another search engine providing the curation. Or it could be farmed out using PKI, similar to how extended verification was done back in the day, except the verification is more encompassing of “human vice” and serves as a feedback signal for the search engine.
echelon 5y ago
> The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, 'I'm the leader. Why should I standardize?' This is the reason. The only reason. Google was the leader in this story. Google built infrastructure and intelligence to handle Norvig's other concerns: provenance and validity. It's not perfect, but it's good enough, and it's a major competitive advantage. Why would they want everyone on the internet to have Google powers at low cost? Wikipedia solves for these concerns. Open source does too. There's no reason we couldn't have had maintainers and curators and a distributed web of pubkey signing to vouch for good data. Most of the data would have been social by nature anyway, and sharing news and articles p2p would have been an early take at the fediverse. But broader than just the Twitter focus. Google launched the WHATWG partially to supplant the W3C and their semantic web push. They knee-capped XHTML and its strong semantics in favor of a loosely typed, messy, and forgiving HTML5. Because Google is one of only a few players that can deduce the semantics on their own. (They then pushed ahead unilaterally so that Chrome was dominant. They fashion the web into an image that suits them.) The Semantic Web would have threatened Google by lowering the barrier to entry to parties that wanted to connect and query data. Of course Google hates it.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  HTML5 does have a fully-supported XML representation, there's no regression from XHTML. And Google themselves are working with schema.org to provide standards that endow web pages with strong semantics, along a semantic-web model - this is basically what's powering "rich" SERP results in Google and other search engines. That doesn't look like they "hate" the semantic web all that much.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

This was in 2006. In 2002 I had lunch with Peter and when I mentioned the Semantic Web, he was not enthusiastic. I would argue that today Google’s Knowledge Graph, DBPedia, and WikiData are all successful projects.

bawolff 5y ago
True, but i feel like central repos like wikidata are quite a bit different from the original vision of many small websites all interoperating into a semantic web. Then again the same thing happened with the normal web. We have wikipedia instead of thousands of people writing articles on their personal homepages.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wibagusto 5y ago
  What is IPFS though if not a glimpse of the future? Distributed makes more sense to me and P2P concepts are being heavily researched with all the blockchain hoo-ha!
  - bawolff 5y ago
    A proof-of-concept that's generated a lot of buzz but not a lot in terms of concrete or unique usage?
- mulmen 5y ago
  But Wikipedia isn't a primary source and presumably it could (and does) link out to those personal sites.
  - teh_klev 5y ago
    Unfortunately you then run into "reliable sources" and "notability" battles with other wikipedians over citing personal websites.

gorgoiler 5y ago

Web … incompetence … PHP … profit … I don’t know much about semantic search. But. PHP is the success story of the Internet and it is the complete opposite of perfection. Go figure.

bawolff 5y ago
As the unix people say, "worse is better".
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Another way of looking at "worse is better" is observing that, while "worse" delivers some results sooner, it also sucks out the oxygen from the room, preventing "better" from ever happening. Iterate it a few times, building one "worse" thing on another "worse" thing, and it's not hard to see why our whole tech stacks are so bad.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    I'll still take code that works in practise over code that works in theory, any day. Turning an idea into practise is not easy and often involves lots of edge cases nobody ever talks about because they aren't the "interesting" part of the solution. I suspect people overestimate how workable some of these theoretically better systems are in reality.

rektide 5y ago

> "What I get a lot is: 'Why are you against the Semantic Web?' I am not against the Semantic Web. But from Google's point of view, there are a few things you need to overcome, incompetence being the first,. . . We deal with millions of Web masters who can't configure a server, can't write HTML. It's hard for them to go to the next step." Thankfully we have a bit more practice writing HTML today. Rdfa & microdata are both fine markup formats for html that are not hard to understand. Rdfa first got semi-started in 2004, & honestly, was not that challenging. More code-centric systems also have JSON-LD as an option, which is fairly simple to author. What concerns me most though is that Norvig seems to be arguing a strong case of worse-is-better, claiming that since some people will find semantic web difficult to publish, it's not worth doing at all. That we could be creating value, that we could be making information more rich is not of interest: the focus is on the downsides, is on creating an image of unsuccess, unpossibility. It's a dissapointing framing & difficult to try to move a conversation forward past this low bogland Norvig sets up. > "The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, 'I'm the leader. Why should I standardize?'" Today Google is a primary instigator/driver of schema.org, along with Microsoft Yahoo, and Yandex. I'd say Google is the best evidence this hard problem wasn't really so hard. Also, there are other perfectly good ontologies out there that also coexist. > "The third problem is one of deception. We deal every day with people who try to rank higher in the results" Again a problem specific to Google. Semantic web doesn't have to be the authoritative source of truth & 100% accurate to start to add value to the world, to make the information on the page meaningful & semantic. But again Norvig is applying his specific demands to the Semantic Web, & making an incredibly high bar. --- The page has been a glossy synthetic produced whole object-artifact for a long time now. I for one continue to hope we can do what the semantic web promised: start to break down the things on the page, to define the page in terms of a construction of a bunch of different, individual, meaningful objects. I don't think truly empowering information & augmenting people (in this semantic web style) is compatible with the mission statement of a company whose goal has been to "organize and make available the world's information," since such a company would be less needed if the information were better able to present & make available itself. Norvig was taking down a huge threat, and one that indeed is not particularly helpful to his cause.

bawolff 5y ago

hendry 5y ago

WHO REMEMBERS XHTML?

MichaelMoser123 5y ago

I remember reading about of projects, that were trying to extract ontology data from wikipedia. Does anyone know, if these efforts were successful?

easton 5y ago
Wikidata was the most successful one, its data is used for Google's knowledge cards and the Siri cards that pop up if you use the Look Up feature in iOS. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
- Vinnl 5y ago
  DBPedia was the one that extracted from Wikipedia; Wikidata is the community curating the data from the ground up (with the goal of importing them into Wikipedia - i.e. the data flows in the opposite direction).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

arpit 5y ago

Interestingly Google today does support (a subset of) Microdata embedded in HTML within Gmail, Google Assistant and Search. Much simpler than the complex constructs of the Semantic Web as originally conceived though.

arthurcolle 5y ago

"He said the next stage of the Web is about making data accessible for artificial intelligence to locate and analyze." Meanwhile, in reality: "F* it, we'll do it live!" with a bit of "hmm what it we add more layers"

musicale 5y ago

Now former Google exec.

paganel 5y ago
That's a TIL for me, apparently it all happened pretty recently [1]. I would have expected that to be on HN as a dedicated post when it happened, or maybe I just missed it. [1] https://fudzilla.com/news/ai/53689-novig-leaves-google-for-stanford https://fudzilla.com/news/ai/53689-novig-leaves-google-for-s...
- pronoiac 5y ago
  There was a post here, and he corrected it: > "Joins Stanford HAI" is correct; "Leaves Google" is not right–I'm keeping my Google badge, but will spend most of my time at Stanford. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28836275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28836275

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

andyjohnson0 5y ago

I'd like to agree with tbl, but I have a nagging feeling that semantic web is a bit like Ted Nelson's ideas for Xanadu: somehow too neat and tidy, wheras the web has been successful despite that. At internet scale the semantic graph is going to have to emerge from automated, deductive effort. There aren't enough people, and there isn't enough human attention or appropriate reward systems, to bring about a widespread semantic web by building metadata librarian-style. I wish it were otherwise.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mrkramer 5y ago

But why Google isn't automating the process? They could suggest webmasters what metadata to put or Google could create metadata themselves.

1shooner 5y ago

I've never seen these two approaches as necessarily in opposition. Yes, search engines can and probably should use proprietary algorithms to derive semantic meaning, relationships, and credibility, but we can also have a more expressive semantic medium to create that content, and give authors more agency when being evaluated by those algorithms. It does not have to be a binary choice between Google black-box and endless viagra spam. Today Google does consume all sorts of structured data. With low/no code web publishing tools, incompetence is not really a blocker.

jhbadger 5y ago

I think calling Peter Norvig "a Google executive" (yes, I know that's the title of the article being linked to) is a great disservice to him. Yes, he worked at Google for a time, but he wasn't some beancounter -- he's an extremely accomplished computer science researcher both in academia and industry.