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World Wide Web

Semantic Web -> Single data source -> The future of search -> Google base

It has just been 2 weeks since me and were discussing, “What will happen to search engines like Google, when the concept of Single data source comes in”.

The concept of single data source would mean that no data would exist in static pages. All the data would reside in some storage unit and the pages would be created (if at all required) at run time based on the users' interests.

The existing search engines work on static pages. How well would this work in Web 2.0? Suppose the only pages that existed in the Internet were dynamic pages, what can the search engines index?

Enter Google… Enter Google Base.

I should have thought of it before. As some “Google 1 hour video” says, Google will never give up. They think way ahead of others!

People are spreading rumors about Google base. Here is what Slashdot has to say. The comments are interesting as well.

Google stepped in and made an official announcement too.

People at Google are not fools! They know that once the world moves towards Semantic web and Web 2.0, the amount of static content is going to be drastically reduced. This would mean that search engines cannot boast of having indexed 8 million (or billion) pages and if they do that, it would be considered seriously out-fashioned. (Google has in fact stopped putting that number in their home page; why they did this is a different story altogether!)

It seems like Google says, “How can we solve this problem? Ask people to send data to us? Yeah, why not?! Why should we go around and ask people for data? Let us ask them to publish it here. We want all info. We have the capacity to store it all here. Make your data dynamic and we'll instantly show the world the data that you created.” (You publish, we subscribe! Inverse-RSSing hah?)

Smart!!!

Now the question comes, whether they are really moving towards the semantic web or not. I think they are. I did not get a chance to see Google base as yet; assuming that all the rumors are spreading true facts about Google Base, Google is using a “name=value” kinda structure in Google base, which is a basic pre-requisite for facts representation in Semantic web.

This could mean that Google would then say, “Just publish it wherever you want in a definite syntax, and we will take it from there”. The only difference between this way of indexing and the present way is that in the new method, Google is able to interpret the content in a much better way as the data is structured.