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I wonder how things would look like if the 'semantic web' (the actual web3?) had taken off and we had regular and rich, machine-readable metadata for just about

I wonder how things would look like if the 'semantic web' (the actual web3?) had taken off and we had regular and rich, machine-readable metadata for just about everything rather than having to rely on what is largely subpar scraping and 'AI' systems. People have pointed out recently how Google search seems to struggle as sites on the internet turn more and more into apps rather than standardized documents and they just go and search on reddit. Having a standard to encode semantics seems honestly necessary at this point if you want to keep things interoperable.

warkdarrior 4y ago
I think Google Search struggles because of SEO/spammed, not webapps. Not sure why SEO will go away in the semantic web.
- warning26 4y ago
  If anything, the semantic web would probably have been easier to do SEO spamming with.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    The semantic web came out of a very academic tradition where scammers and spammers weren't lurking around every corner. Yeah, in addition to its other problems, it wasn't especially attuned with the Internet as it actually came to exist.
lmm 4y ago
Google "won" in the first place by being less semantic than their competitors (who used meta keyword tags etc. which made them very vulnerable to spam) and just reading the text of the page (and especially of links to the page) instead.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  This is not how I remember Google winning. In those days of search it wasn't spam clogging up search results, it was just plain hard to find things. Google won because you could find things on Google you couldn't find elsewhere. You could probably recreate exactly that phenomenon today, however complicated by the fact that legitimate good-intentioned creators have to behave in much the same way as spammers.
  - crmd 4y ago
    At that time google had zero profit motive. They were proving product market fit by returning as the top result the page you were most likely looking for. You would have to go back to original pagerank and ignore SEO and ad sales optimization to deliver the same value today.
    - Retric 4y ago
      Having people curate the index can go a long way independent of any specific algorithm.
      - rovr138 4y ago
        They track when you click. Combine that with Google Analytics, they know how long you stayed there. They also know if you went back, clicked on another and so on.
  - lmm 4y ago
    You're right that it mostly wasn't true spam, but AIUI a lot of those bad results were because of outdated or inaccurate meta tags.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
I highly, highly doubt it, primarily because Google already does this[1]. They support formats defined on schema.org. Google correctly realized early on that this idea that content creators would correctly tag and structure everything is a software developer's pipe dream. The "semantic web" failed precisely because the real world is much messier than that. 1. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/intro-structured-data https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...
IanCal 4y ago
Realistically the metadata would regularly be at odds with the visible data. > Having a standard to encode semantics seems honestly necessary at this point if you want to keep things interoperable. The trick is with the incentive structure. Metadata is very common on academic paper pages, because Google scholar doesn't index them if they don't have it. However it's also commonly just wrong.
aaron695 4y ago

warkdarrior 4y ago

I think Google Search struggles because of SEO/spammed, not webapps. Not sure why SEO will go away in the semantic web.

warning26 4y ago
If anything, the semantic web would probably have been easier to do SEO spamming with.
- ghaff 4y ago
  The semantic web came out of a very academic tradition where scammers and spammers weren't lurking around every corner. Yeah, in addition to its other problems, it wasn't especially attuned with the Internet as it actually came to exist.

lmm 4y ago

Google "won" in the first place by being less semantic than their competitors (who used meta keyword tags etc. which made them very vulnerable to spam) and just reading the text of the page (and especially of links to the page) instead.

colechristensen 4y ago
This is not how I remember Google winning. In those days of search it wasn't spam clogging up search results, it was just plain hard to find things. Google won because you could find things on Google you couldn't find elsewhere. You could probably recreate exactly that phenomenon today, however complicated by the fact that legitimate good-intentioned creators have to behave in much the same way as spammers.
- crmd 4y ago
  At that time google had zero profit motive. They were proving product market fit by returning as the top result the page you were most likely looking for. You would have to go back to original pagerank and ignore SEO and ad sales optimization to deliver the same value today.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Having people curate the index can go a long way independent of any specific algorithm.
    - rovr138 4y ago
      They track when you click. Combine that with Google Analytics, they know how long you stayed there. They also know if you went back, clicked on another and so on.
- lmm 4y ago
  You're right that it mostly wasn't true spam, but AIUI a lot of those bad results were because of outdated or inaccurate meta tags.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

I highly, highly doubt it, primarily because Google already does this[1]. They support formats defined on schema.org. Google correctly realized early on that this idea that content creators would correctly tag and structure everything is a software developer's pipe dream. The "semantic web" failed precisely because the real world is much messier than that. 1. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/intro-structured-data https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...

IanCal 4y ago

Realistically the metadata would regularly be at odds with the visible data. > Having a standard to encode semantics seems honestly necessary at this point if you want to keep things interoperable. The trick is with the incentive structure. Metadata is very common on academic paper pages, because Google scholar doesn't index them if they don't have it. However it's also commonly just wrong.

aaron695 4y ago