Clay Shirky is continuing to set himself up as the anti-semantic web guy. Its an easy target and good for spin. But, after all, what is anti-semantic if it isn’t meaningless.
Clay on the Yahoo ontology: “it sucked. Sucked sucked sucked. We didn’t even know how bad it sucked until Google came along and (its hard to remember this even five years later) saved the Web from drowning in its own waste.”
Well, three things:
Google is a search engine, and does pretty much what Altavista did 5 years ago, before they stopped being just a search engine. They sensibly ignore meta tags, but that was largely to do with people deliberately entering false information. Yahoo’s category search (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) is becoming a search engine ‘Yase’ because its difficult to impose ontologies on the web as a whole.
Things that aren’t really search engines, like Amazon and Ebay, or the classification of species for that matter, would be useless without some kind of ontology.
Even without a complete hierarchical system for classification, metadata is useful where pure full text search fails. Try searching for a cheap flight on Google, you can’t – unless they scrape the metadata.