Google and the Semantic Web
Google executive to Tim Berners-Lee:
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. The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, I’m the leader. Why should I standardize?’ The third problem is one of deception. We deal every day with people who try to rank higher in the results and then try to sell someone Viagra when that’s not what they are looking for. With less human oversight with the Semantic Web, we are worried about it being easier to be deceptive,
Ahem, in other words, “Google wants to be the center of the metadata and search universe, and there’s little need for Google-as-we-know-it if the semantic web is realized.”
The notion of a web-scale, decentralized, and distributed database is a challenging one, both for conventional thinking, as well as for the market position of those—like Google—who rose to the top based on a different approach.
I personally would rather have thousands of distributed nodes serving up RDF scholarly metadata, than rely on Google for pulling it all together for me. I have more confidence in that vision than I do, for example, in Google Scholar or MS Academic Live.
