According to the project’s
website, Theseus promises to deliver Web 3.0 where individual Net users will not only be able to produce and edit content (already in existence in today’s Web 2.0 world) but also set rules to better clarify contextually how the vast amounts of information are indexed and retrieved. The concept is a nod to humans over software algorithms, a nod to the wisdom of crowds over Google.
Search algorithms are fine if you more or less know precisely what information you want to retrieve from a search query. But all too often the links are out of date and trigger more false positives than relevant results. But we tend to overlook these limitations because the results pop up quickly and we’ve learned to scroll through the flotsam to pinpoint the best approximate result. Usually, by the third or fourth click we’ve either found what we’re looking for, or we know how to better refine our search command.
This is hardly efficient.
A search engine based on so-called “semantic technologies” would eliminate much of the guesswork from today’s search engines. As the German team at Theseus describes it in classically Teutonic prose: “The Internet of the next generation (Web 3.0) will provide easy access to the structured global knowledge and to novel services, and crucially improve the quality of information of the relevant contents that are needed at a given moment.”
And, how will Google stand up to such a competitor? Google may in fact benefit from the European countries’ largesse. It is one of the biggest investors in search technology in Europe, and, whether or not it is asked to lend its expertise to the initiative, it is widely assumed Google will simply index the semantic web platform developed by the French and the Germans and allow its hundreds of millions of users to conduct searches on it.
Back to page one.
Bernhard Warner is a technology reporter based in Rome. He is the former European Internet Correspondent for Reuters and, prior to that was a senior editor at The Industry Standard. His work has appeared in Wired, The Times Online, Time and The Guardian, to name a few. He also works as a Web 2.0 consultant for Custom Communication
Published on 24 July 2007
