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Untangling Web Information
Ostracus writes "The next big stage in the evolution of the Internet, according to many experts and luminaries, will be the advent of the Semantic Web — that is, technologies that let computers process the meaning of Web pages instead of simply downloading or serving them up blindly. Microsoft's acquisition of the semantic search engine Powerset earlier this year shows faith in this vision. But thus far, little Semantic Web technology has been available to the general public. That's why many eyes will be on Twine, a Web organizer based on semantic technology that launches publicly today."
The advertisers and search engine optimizers have already shown that they have absolutely ZERO qualms about providing false or misleading information to search engine robots in the form of page cloaking, hidden frames, false meta tags, etc so what makes anyone believe that they will not play the same games, possibly with even greater result, against the semantic web? There is money to be made by gaming the system and as long as it is possible for website operators to describe themselves on the semantic web then they will describe themselves in any way they have to to drive traffic to their sites and get ad hits, truth be damned.
Twine seems to be just a generic contextual search engine, as opposed to a pure keyword search engine. While it's a step, it's a very tiny step.
What I want to see is more about the correlation between topics. For example, if I'm looking into PHP templating and search twine, I get a few people's bookmarks on the topic. Nothing especially useful, and definitely nothing I couldn't find elsewhere. With real semantics I'd want to see a list of various templating engines, pro and con articles grouped for each, and maybe other sections on related design patterns and frameworks.
In other words, I want to see semantics. Context search isn't going to make anyone turn their head.
Developers: We can use your help.