Inside Google's Plan to Build a Catalog of Every Single Thing, Ever
Inside Google’s Plan to Build a Catalog of Every Single Thing, Ever
Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic on Google’s Knowledge Graph:
This is one of those human knowledge projects that is ridiculous in scope and possibly in impact. And yet when it gets turned into a consumer product, all we see is a useful module for figuring out Tom Cruise’s height more quickly. In principle, this is both good and bad. It’s good because technology should serve human needs and we shouldn’t worship the technology itself. It’s bad because it’s easy to miss out on the importance of the infrastructure and ideology that are going to increasingly inform the way Google responds to search requests. And given that Google is many people’s default portal to the world of information, even a subtle change in the company’s toolset is worth considering.
And that’s how I found myself on the phone with John Giannandrea discussing mojitos and semantic graphs.
Sounds like another stab at the Semantic Web. It’ll be interesting to see how Facebook’s Open Graph actions play out in this space as well.
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