David
Worlock, CEO of EPS Limited, published
an article today (as part of the EPS Insights service)
discussing Google and the semantic web. He
caught my interest with his account of how Google was reacting to a potentially
radical change in their market: semantic web searching. 

While attending the Boston meeting of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Google got into a "confrontation" concerning the importance of semantic web searching.

Keyword search is at the
core of Google’s business. And as David
points out, “…what is more difficult…than a company created by a technology
re-inventing itself in terms of a new technology?”  

No
wonder “Google seems anxious to diminish [the value of] semantic web searching”.

How did they do that?

“Google
pointed to user and webmaster incompetence”. If this were true, wouldn’t you want to be the first to create the tools
and mechanisms to make this easier for your customers? If you don’t, don’t you think someone else
will?  

“The answer to the
Semantic Web, from a Google stance, thus appears to be: very interesting, but
not very soon.”

If there is one thing I
hope we’ve all learned over the last several years, it’s that there are no
longer laurels on which we can rest. 

We all need to
continuously change to keep up with the customers we serve and the options
available to them. If we really want to
“WOW” them we have to do more than keep up, we need to lead the way.

I would love to know
what Google is doing about semantic web searching. Is their extraordinary success with keyword
search causing them to completely ignore semantic search or are they just
keeping quiet?