Sex & the Search Engine

[Nick Arnett]

At 08:20 AM 1/25/98 -0800, Danny Sullivan wrote:
>> It would be good if the major search engines would incorporate
>> PICS ratings, for the purpose you described -- filtering out
>> irrelevant information, regardless of its offensiveness.  The W3C's
>> meta-data The W3C's meta-data initiatives have a goal of merging
>> PICS and other meta-data by encoding it as RDF (Resource
>> Description Framework). 
>
>Yep, though don't expect that this will necessarily solve anything. 
>For a detailed look at why not, see my article from December at:
>
>http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/9712-metatags.htm

There are some erroneous statements in the article.

* Netscape didn't back MCF, which was created at Apple.  Netscape hired its
inventor and he is spearheading their RDF developments.  He and Microsoft's
representative are the authors of the RDF schema proposal.  The chairman is
from IBM.

* Digital Equipment, which operates Altavista, is participating, so there
is at least one major search service vendor.

* Verity is participating, so there is one major search software developer.
 I am a member of the RDF Schema Working Group.

* Dublin Core was not developed by the Web community; RDF is a project of
the W3C and is complementary to Dublin Core, not competitive.  It should
help spur implementation of DC.

* RDF's design goals include that it can be encoded as easily as HTML (I
don't agree, but the committee feels otherwise).  It is unfair to criticize
it as more complicated when it isn't even proposed yet.  Just as browsers
may be quite complex, the applications that use and produce RDF may be
complex.

It is difficult to imagine a future in which large search services are
useful unless they begin to incorporate meta-data.  I am quite sure that
you will see serious competitors to them emerge if they fail to do so.
You'll see large Internet infrastructure companies who serve as trusted
meta-data exchanges.

New search features show up initially in software tools such as ours, then
they migrate to the large services as the technology becomes less expensive
and higher in performance.  I can't identify one advanced feature of the
large search services that wasn't shipped first by a software tools vendor.

Nick

--
    Senior Product Manager, Knowledge Applications
        Verity Inc.  (http://www.verity.com/)
        "Connecting People with Information"
  Phone: (408) 542-2164  E-mail: narnett at verity.com