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The End of Google ?

On June 26, 2006 at 5:20am EST, the Evolving Trends web site published an article entitled "Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?". By June 28th, two days later, the article had reached 650,000 people - by July 1st, it was being referenced by over 6,000 other sites and had been read by close to 2,000,000 people.

This phenomena demonstrated two things. First, it demonstrated the ability of the Web to generate a tremendous surge of interest in a fairly specialized subject at short notice by selecting pithy, controversial titles.

Google as a Knowledge Bottleneck

Secondly, and more importantly, it seems to demonstrate a growing dissatisfaction with Google approach to classifying knowledge via search engines and indexing. Certainly anyone who has studied the efficacy of the Google indexing paradigm knows that a well-formed Google search may reveal no more than 10% of the interesting sites on a given subject, depending on circumstances. While the resources of Web with a hundred million or so pages was readily accessible by Google, a Web of ten billion pages has apparently overwhelmed the basic indexing and search technology. The information you are looking for is probably out there somewhere, but it may take a long struggle and good luck in order to find it.

Semantic Wikis may provide an alternative to the Google 'knowledge bottleneck'. There is also a certain political dimension to the restlessness with Google's near monopoly on web search combined with an emerging role as global censor of inconvenient truths. This may be fueling the dissatisfaction.

On the other hand, Google seems to be well aware of the bottleneck problem and is struggling mightily to bring simple semantic functions to the desktop that will be usable in the Semantic Web.

There is a well-written and funny parody of a future Google's titled August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and bay to the Semantic Web. In addition to presenting an excellent vision of the Semantic Web in the year 2009 ( written in 2002, but not that far away now ), it also expresses some of the deeper concerns about excessive centralization and control of information sources in a free society.