Re:Google Squared is Live
by abossy on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @05:12PM
(#640428)
Google is returning structured data.
Google's specialty has been navigating through the seas of unstructured Web data that comprises the Web and making sense of it. Squared shows that they understand enough about this data to (semi-) automatically return it in a structured form.
Structured data on this scale is considered a bit of a holy grail, especially from the POV of Semantic Web advocates. The cornerstone of the original Semantic Web vision was to have web developers manually annotate semantics into their HTML sites. Now they don't have to.
The real value of Squared is the ability to query this data via an API. Arguably, Freebase already provides this capability, so the value of Squared is questionable, but presumably, Google is more automated and up-to-date or at a larger scale. I'm not sure -- maybe somebody more well-informed than I can comment.
Google's specialty has been navigating through the seas of unstructured Web data that comprises the Web and making sense of it. Squared shows that they understand enough about this data to (semi-) automatically return it in a structured form.
Structured data on this scale is considered a bit of a holy grail, especially from the POV of Semantic Web advocates. The cornerstone of the original Semantic Web vision was to have web developers manually annotate semantics into their HTML sites. Now they don't have to.
The real value of Squared is the ability to query this data via an API. Arguably, Freebase already provides this capability, so the value of Squared is questionable, but presumably, Google is more automated and up-to-date or at a larger scale. I'm not sure -- maybe somebody more well-informed than I can comment.