Just read Web 2.0 Expo: the end of the online search driven era?. The article argues that LinkedData, aka the Semantic Web, aka Web 3.0, might be a threat to Googles dominating position. I was actually thinking the opposite. To me, Web 2.0 and SOA seem a bigger issue for Google. Web 2.0 interfaces are mostly dynamically created javascript pages. Hard, if not impossible, to crawl for Google. And SOA puts all the data behind unstandardized WebService/SOAP services. Again, a pain to index.
LinkedData on the other hand, is perfect for Google. All the data out in the open, accessible via standardized operations (REST), all interlinked and easy to crawl. In addition, applications and people are adding additional semantic meta-data, which can be used to improve the search results.
The only question that remains: are we still going to search? People seem to think that Real-time conversations like on twitter or friendfeed will impact our search behaviour. I’m not yet convinced. Today i tried to follow the friendfeed beta news on twitter using TweetDeck. Very disappointing. Lots of tweets pointing to a handfull of blog posts about the update. Lots of: “i like it”, “sweet”. But very little insight and interesting points. I guess i’ll read some blog posts to give me a summary of what’s new and interesting on friendfeed. We need much better tools than friendfeed beta, before the real-time web is going to be a threat to google. But until that time, the real-time web is only helping Google improve it’s search results.