|
I think you mean when semantic web was the next Big Thing. Better search would have been a nice side effect of a semantic web. I was a big enthusiast of all the potential a semantic web could have brought. In my opinion due to the rise of social networks, content got heavily centralized, and it wasn't in the centralized platform's interest to annotate it, or allow others to consume it. For a short period of my time on the internet, when most in my close circle of friends, had WP blogs and blogrolls in the sidebar, you'd get at least some FOAF annotations on those links. I could complain for a whole afternoon about the clunkiness of supporting software and technologies (RDF, triple stores, ontologies, graph databases, etc), as it wasn't easy as a coder to hack on these technologies developed by consortiums. As far as semantic search goes. I think that due to the heavy SaaS-ification of software, now there isn't even an incentive to create better search tooling. I know the landscape of search systems is huge, and while there is no way for me to assess all existing software, I've just stuck with the the tried and tested Apache Solr (or ElasticSearch) on projects I worked on. And those are not easily tweaked into semantic search engines. My experience with Google Search for the past few years is that results based on their knowledge graph have been gamed heavily. There's a lot of junk in those results that is very much adjacent to the keywords I'm searching. You'll see the common suggestion on HN as well, when you search for a product review to also include news.ycombinator.com/reddit.com in your query based on the type of product you're looking for. |