The green shoots of the semantic web

Or in other words search starts to get serious. As if it wasn't already.

I have been reading John Battelle's book The Search And have got to a really interesting part about the semantic web

Its about perfect search. Battelle explains

But perfect search will require more than ubiquity, clickstreams, and personalisation. The vast corpus of information now available to us is often meaningless unless it is somehow tagged - identified in such a way that search engines can best make sense of it and serve it up to us

Basically the web becomes more intelligent.

Battelle theorises, how this might work referencing IBM's web fountain

Tell me all the places on the web where The Passion of the Christ is discussed that also mentions one of the top five box office movies that is not Lord of the Rings, and throw out all sites that are either in Spanish, or are in the Southern Hemisphere?

Cute. But there is more.

Battelle also talks about 'highly focused domain specific search'. His example is an engineering-specific search engine called Globalspec with a robust community of 1 million engineers, who use this engine to spec and find parts. The origins of Globalspec into it becoming what it is today returns us to the issue of answering specific questions with high-value and therefore more commercial answers.

Battelle elaborates

To my mind, Globalspec points the way toward the creation of untold numbers of powerful vertical search engines which, because they are limited in domain and, exclusive by nature, can, in fact, offer extremely cool tools to find what you want... And when the borders of those search engines begin to touch eachother, lily-pad like, magic can happen

I mention this as I was reading an article entitled Buy with a little help from my friends

Which looks at the rise of music recommendation sites. And I think perfect search fits neatly in here. Not yet - but perhaps within 5 years.

There is an argument that technological innovations over the past 25 years have democratised music. Get yourself a laptop and some cheap (or free) software and you can make the kind of composition that would once have cost Pink Floyd a fortune. Music - electronic music in particular - is finally for the masses. But the net result has been a proliferation in the sheer amount of music now available. Unsurprisingly, it isn't all good.

All of which has made the task of finding something you love that bit harder. The old answers - riffling through your elder sibling's LP collection or tuning into pirate radio - won't suffice. Record shops, after all, list alphabetically or by broad genre, not "X sounds like Y".

Last.fm and Pandora get close examination. Not perfect by any imagination for a variety of reasons but you can see the pressing imperative for perfect search.

This also links into the long tail theory and also of a search narrative. Wouldn't it be cool to follow the narrative of who influenced who? You could find yourself in some really interesting territory? And buy some very different music!

While the recommendation sites may require fine tuning, they offer a fantastic way to navigate the ever-larger ocean of music. In this day and age it's really difficult to find the music you like without having something like a music profile. Sites like this are going to become more and more crucial.

Music writer John Mullen thinks there is potential. "It feels a little bit like a quaint parlour game at the moment," he says. "I'm sure in five years' time, things like Pandora will be awesomely accurate. But like computer games, you start off with the ZX Spectrum and you end up with Grand Theft Auto."

Comments

[MaynardLynnette]

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[Henry Peise]

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