Google Support Fires Up Web 3.0 Conference

By Tom Dunlap

If you were going to plan a conference on the world of Web 3.0, aka the Semantic Web, next week would be a good week. Good timing, with all the recent news.

Well, timing is indeed everything. My company, WebMediaBrands, is holding such a conference. The Web 3.0 Conference will go down Tuesday and Wednesday at the New Yorker Hotel in New York. Click here for more info. Seats are still available.

The big search/Web 3.0 news this week came from Google. The search behemoth is finally supporting a couple of key standards. As SemanticWeb.com's Jennifer Zaino reported:

Google has added a host of new features to its leading platform -- and support for semantic web technologies is among them. It is supporting the open standards RDFa and microformats as part of its new Rich Snippets feature for annotating meaning within search results.

... With Rich Snippets, preview text for Google search results grow richer by the inclusion of new metadata that can make it more efficient to search for reviews, people, and the like. For example, users searching for a particular person can get better insight into facts about that individual to ensure they click on the right link the first time -- among a host of Mary Smiths, for instance, you can key in on the one that works in San Francisco, for a particular company when the appropriate metadata has been tied to her professional profile on a directory like Linked In.
Webmasters who begin using RDFa or microformats to add these tags are not only going to help Google improve its search results, the company says, but are taking a big step to making the Internet smarter.

The news caused a huge splash in the search and Semantic Web ponds, and the ripples are only starting. The definitive analysis of this news so far comes from Tim O'Reilly, who writes:

There's a long-time debate between those who advocate for  semantic markup, and those who believe that  machine learning will eventually get us to the holy grail of a Semantic Web, one in which computer programs actually understand the meaning of what they see and read. Google has of course been the great proof point of the power of machine learning algorithms.

Earlier this week, Google made a nod to the other side of the debate, introducing a feature that they call "Rich Snippets." Basically, if you mark up pages with certain  microformats ( and soon, with  RDFa), Google will take this data into account, and will provide enhanced snippets in the search results.

... Rich snippets could be a turning point for the Semantic Web, since, for the first time, they create a powerful economic motivation for semantic markup. Google has told us that rich snippets significantly enhance click-through rates. That means that anyone who has been doing SEO is now going to have to add microformats and RDFa to their toolkit.

In other news, Wolfram Alpha, the brand new search engine -- or "computation engine" -- that introduces a totally new way to search the web, launches tonight. The service is trying to avoid inflated expectations. But it is a compelling new approach to finding information and making sense of it, as Adam Ostrow explained in his recent review.

How big will either the Google support or the Wolram technology be? Search me. Check back soon for more details.