Venture beat looks at semantic search as a solution to data overload:
Finding technologies are nice, but I see additional social changes around information overload, as people spend less time memorizing information and more time memorizing information locations. A book report might look like a list of reference sites and paragraph extractions followed by 2-3 paragraphs of new conclusions. Case challenges presented at hiring fairs might require the applicant to state the internet resources she'd use to solve the problem. Your bookmarks say a good deal about your personality. Someday we may see dating engines/ personality engines based on mutual website history matching rather than written descriptions (it would be really, really easy to build this). As the mountain of information grows, the subset of information resources that I can bring to the table becomes an essential part of who I am.
Eventually, we will find out that our ability to draw new and useful conclusions out of our information resources depends on the structure of those resources (the way the information is presented). Finding technologies are just the tip of the iceberg. Once I have found data on the web, how can I re-arrange that data in order to generate new and useful insights. Simply finding information is important but it is not an end point.
Folks, we are approaching a Mega information clutter in the near future. There will be trillions of Web pages. People will have petabytes (quadrillions of bytes) of information on their local computers, and it will look like the biggest mess ever piled up in the history of human civilizations. A big portion of this information is junk, irrelevant, accidental and bad quality...Our last hope is the “finding” technologies - namely, the search engines. The mess will still be there, just with better search engines we might be able to steer around the garbage. Therefore, the critical question is how much better the search engines should get to save the day?
Finding technologies are nice, but I see additional social changes around information overload, as people spend less time memorizing information and more time memorizing information locations. A book report might look like a list of reference sites and paragraph extractions followed by 2-3 paragraphs of new conclusions. Case challenges presented at hiring fairs might require the applicant to state the internet resources she'd use to solve the problem. Your bookmarks say a good deal about your personality. Someday we may see dating engines/ personality engines based on mutual website history matching rather than written descriptions (it would be really, really easy to build this). As the mountain of information grows, the subset of information resources that I can bring to the table becomes an essential part of who I am.
Eventually, we will find out that our ability to draw new and useful conclusions out of our information resources depends on the structure of those resources (the way the information is presented). Finding technologies are just the tip of the iceberg. Once I have found data on the web, how can I re-arrange that data in order to generate new and useful insights. Simply finding information is important but it is not an end point.
