The need for a more semantic web

When we think about the Web, we assume it existed forever. But in fact, it was created in 1989, just 34 years ago. And during this short period of existence, it went from a child, through a teenager, to someone who have a midlife crisis.

Web, today, is not what it was 15 years ago. Back then, all we cared for—is content. Today—we care about things. When we search for “1984”, we expect crawlers to understand that we, most likely, mean the 1984 Novel by George Orwell.

But how do web crawlers know to understand that 1984 is indeed a novel? You could say—AI, but this will be far from the truth. While I don’t have doubts that AI might be involved in content classification—the technology that crawlers rely on, today, is far more simpler.

This technology is called semantic web formats. There are multiple formats that provide semantic information of web pages, but none of them is an established standard.

Here’s the thing. We already have a format and a standard for web pages. It’s called HTML. When you look at an HTML webpage—you know to distinguish between a blog post and a pancake recipe. But crawlers don’t. And this creates a suboptimal situation for us—humans. In order to make the web better for us, we first need to make the web better for machines.

Each period in the life of the Web, for the past 34 years, created something new. The childhood of the Web can be associated with its maturity and the birth of CSS and proper HTML standard. It’s teenage years—gave us reactivity and Ajax. And I believe that the midlife crisis that the web experiences right now—will be the birth of the semantic web. It must be, otherwise we will be drawn in a sea of search results that make no sense.

Join me to a short overwrite of the history of the Web, and a call to action to make the Web a better place for all of us, in my new blog post: The need for a more semantic web.