Esther Dyson (who is nobody’s fool) asks why Google have bought Applied Semantics. Craig Silverstein replies that it has to do with advertising, so Esther asks if it has anything to do with the ‘Application of Semantics’. Craig has nothing to add – and a murmur sweeps the room as if to say, ah they are up to something with the Semantic Web… crap.
1. Applied Semantics and fancy fuzzy search or categorization has nothing to do with the Semantic Web. If anything the polar opposite type of search technology is required – something that takes advantage of semi-structured documents such as an XML or RDF database.
2. Google is an advertising company. Search is a fairly finite field in computing – and Google’s research team is now bigger than any University’s – they have this area sewn up. What they don’t have sewn up is the technology and services required for advertising, and this is how Google makes its money.
The problem with this meme not propagating is twofold:
1. An advertising company doesn’t sound cool – so people prefer to think of Google as a cutting edge technology company (which it obviously is as well even if that role is coincidentally more useful from a PR perspective).
2. People love conspiracies or hidden agendas – ooh what was the agenda behind the Blogger acquisition – probably none other than access to a big user base that puts metadata around links and therefore can help keep pagerank on the rails.
The really interesting thing about the Applied Semantics acquisition is the lack of a cool, secret, Semantic Web skunk works being built by a team of crack engineers at Google – the really interesting thing is its banality, they are buying bits and pieces to help with targeted advertising, and it may be that all they needed was some ‘intellectual property’ or patents, so that they could develop a refined ad delivery system without infringement. Nobody likes a boring story, however.
Good analysis of Applied Semantics by Azeem