As rumored last week, Microsoft, with the notion of a Yahoo deal receding quickly in the rear-view mirror, is taking another tack in its efforts to stem the dominance of Google search — rather than playing catch up, it wants to try leapfrog. Today, Microsoft confirmed an agreement to buy Powerset, one of the leaders in semantic search, which attempts to glean the context and intent of a search rather than just matching keywords against the content of ranked pages. Details of the deal weren’t revealed, but the price is rumored to be in the $100 million neighborhood. “We’re buying Powerset first and foremost because we’re impressed with the people there,” Microsoft’s Live Search blog said. “We came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision. That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.”
There are challenges aplenty in the strategy. Semantic search is a non-trivial exercise involving the honing of the technology and the re-indexing of the searchable Web, and semantic analysis of a page is much more computing-intensive than simply scanning text. On its own, Powerset had been limited to demonstrating its proof of concept in searches through the finite world of Wikipedia. Microsoft has the infrastructure and the war chest to expand that reach, first, perhaps, in vertical search categories where semantic search has done the best so far. It will be a while before the success of this approach can be judged, and there’s always the chance that Google might innovate or buy its way into the same territory, but Microsoft needed to do something to try to pull its search share out of single digits, and this looks like as good a bet as any. “Microsoft’s acquisition of Powerset makes perfect sense and is probably the best shot at a disruptive technology that might allow it to leapfrog Google,” said Andrei Hagiu, assistant professor of strategy, focusing on technology, at Harvard Business School.
Posted by admin | Posted in Semantic Web, Web 3.0 | Posted on 05-02-2008
On the UK’s Guardian newspaper site today, writer Jemina Kiss suggested that Web 3.0 will be about recommendation. “If web 2.0 could be summarized as interaction, web 3.0 must be about recommendation and personalization,” she wrote. Using Last.fm and Facebook’s Beacon as an example, Kiss painted a picture of a web where personalized recommendation services can feed us information on new music, new products, and where to eat. It’s a marketers dream and it’s really not far off from the definitions we’ve come up with in the past here on ReadWriteWeb.
We’ve written about web 3.0 and attempted to define it many, many times here over the past year. One of the common themes between almost all of the posts is that Web 3.0 and the vision of the Semantic Web are joined at the hip.
Last April, we held a contest asking readers for their web 3.0 definitions. Our favorite came from Robert O’Brien, who defined Web 3.0 as a “decentralized asynchronous me.”
“Web 1.0: Centralized Them. Web 2.0: Distributed Us. Web 3.0: Decentralized Me,” he wrote. “[Web 3.0 is] about me when I don’t want to participate in the world. It’s about me when I want to have more control of my environment particularly who I let in. When my attention is stretched who/what do I pay attention to and who do I let pay attention to me. It is more effective communication for me!”
What O’Brien was getting at is basically what Kiss was getting at: personalization and recommendation. And that’s the promise of the Semantic Web. The easiest way to sell the Semantic Web vision to consumers is to talk about how it can make their lives easier. When machines understand things in human terms, and can apply that knowledge to your attention data, we’ll have a web that knows what we want and when we want it. Read More>>
This book is written to address the questions most people ask - From “What were you thinking when you invented it?” through “So what do you think of it now?” to “Where is this all going to take us?”, this is the story.
It is not a technical book. (If you want the technical details, check out the W3C web site!). It does mention a little about how technologies you may have heard of - like XML - fit in to the past, present and future, but only in the course of charting the course for the Web from the initial dream - still largely unfulfilled - to the next technical and social revolution.
Now it has been out for a while, it seems different people like different bits.
-Tim BL
More>>
According to Webster’s Online Dictionary semantic means “the relationships between symbols and what they represent.” Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, has used the term to christen the Internet of the future.
The Semantic Web is a set of technologies he’s developing right now as director of the World Wide Web Consortium, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Born in London in 1955, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004. In this exclusive interview, he explains his vision of the future Semantic Web, which he says will be much more powerful than anything we have seen before.More>>
After taking one of the first Internet companies — EarthWeb — public in 1998, Nova Spivack joined some friends at a weedy airstrip deep inside the new Russia for a trip into Earth’s stratosphere.
Having space travel on your resume is de rigueur for Internet entrepreneurs these days, but this was 1999, and not even the Russian pilots were sure how the flight would turn out. As Spivack was being strapped into a MiG-25 and prepped for his trip at Mach 3, about 20 miles straight up, he looked around for an ejection button or lever in case things went south.More>>
Do you know your Web 2.0? Take the eWEEK Emerging Technology Web 2.0 quiz.
WEB 2.0 Quiz
There are now 3.5 million AJAX developers worldwide, a 50 percent increase over the past year, based on results of a survey that will be released next week.
The survey, conducted by Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Evans Data Corp., will also reveal that nearly four out of five, or 78 percent, of AJAX applications are developed for the Web and nearly 40 percent are for server-centric applications such as databases, ERP, CRM, as well as rich Internet applications.More>>
Posted by admin | Posted in Semantic Web, Web 3.0 | Posted on 22-11-2006
The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and its not part of the web. I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar?
Why not? Because we don’t have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself.
The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for interchange of data, where on the original Web we only had interchange of documents. Also it is about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.>>
As rumored last week, Microsoft, with the notion of a Yahoo deal receding quickly in the rear-view mirror, is taking another tack in its efforts to stem the dominance of Google search — rather than playing catch up, it wants to try leapfrog. Today, Microsoft confirmed an agreement to buy Powerset, one of the leaders in semantic search, which attempts to glean the context and intent of a search rather than just matching keywords against the content of ranked pages. Details of the deal weren’t revealed, but the price is rumored to be in the $100 million neighborhood. “We’re buying Powerset first and foremost because we’re impressed with the people there,” Microsoft’s Live Search blog said. “We came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision. That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.”
