Google = God?

Maybe Google got it right all along. But is it God? That often appears to be the way that most people do their searching online nowadays, expecting to find the answer to just about anything. Yihong Ding calls this kind of searching, "oracle-based" web searching, which search engines such as Google are assumed to know everything. But this worked relatively well in the early days of the Web because it a pragmatic and affordable strategy; at that time, the quantity of web resources was comparatively small. We rarely searched for meaning. Based on this premise, to build a semantic oracle (i.e. Semantic Google) is equiavalent to create a real God (who knows everything) to human beings.

Perhaps, according to Ding, a better alternative is collaborative searching. Since current answer-based search strategy is motivated by questions, collaborative search is motivated by answers. In our answer-based search model, the ones who answer questions may not have passion (or enough knowledge) to questions. But an inanimate search engine such as Google doesn't know this -- nor does it care.

However, Web 2.0 is slowly changing this course of searching. Already, search engines such as Cha Cha are harvesting collective intelligence and wisdom of the crowds to retrieve more "relevant" results. Ding goes one point further: Web 3.0 will be based on community-sensitive link resources. It will reverse the relation between horizontal search engines and vertical search engines. The current model of vertical search engines being built upon generic search engines are not working well because they are too immature to provide communicate-specific search by themselves. (Just look at the limitations of Rollyo). What will the Semantic Web search engine look like? Maybe something like this.