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Search is dead. Long live the semantic web.

• davegauer 15y ago
  I'm not sure why you were downvoted. "Semantic Web" was the first thing that came to my mind after reading the first couple paragraphs of the article. I thought he was going to head that direction as well. I was sorely disappointed! There are surely diminishing returns for doing increasingly sophisticated things with the contents of HTML tags to parse and understand webpages, using inbound links to rank them, etc. Cory Doctorow's essay, "Metacrap," does a great job of listing the reasons a Semantic Web-style metadata attempt will always fail when left to the "public" to implement. One thing that the old human-run Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project do get right are the quality of results, but since updates are made at the speed of human, these seem to be pretty much impossible to keep current. Perhaps there is some neat way to use everyone's browsing histories to create a semantic link between content on the web. But that will never happen because of (extremely valid) privacy concerns. Well, shame on the author for writing such a myopic rant piece containing no new ideas or proposals.