nongdan | 
03 19th, 2009| 
A human gets information by asking a question to get an answer, but online, we’ve been forced to learn “keyword” searches.
The thinking was that we could extract meaning from several abstract words (aka keywords) most closely related to what we were seeking. The problem is that this does not work in getting a real answer. As we’ve started to see with new developments in search techniques from EyePlorer, Wolfram Alpha, and even Twitter’s value in search, the market is aggressively looking for a more meaningful approach. To boil it down, the major issues with the keyword search model are:
- Results are not completely relevant to the original query
- Lack of accuracy leads to an overabundance of results
- Too time consuming to comb through that much information
Let’s look at an example of how search works today. Search for “best cat food,” and you’ll get more than 93 million pages including these keywords, prioritized using the secret sauce of the search engine.
Today’s Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What we mean by ‘Web 3.0′ is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services – and will effectively expose their information to the world.