- A browser that instantly shows you the content you’ll find most interesting
- Search engines that return fewer, better results – every time
- A marketplace that always tells you the best products and services, and lets you advertise anything you like
- A world with no more spam, phishing or online scams
- Being able to access your contacts’ current details all the time, without effort
- and being able to find the right contact wherever you are
An evolutionary step
The web has given us some great applications that let us do some amazing things: communicate, publish, share, and shop with greater ease and speed than ever before. People, content, and data are more fluid and connected than ever before.However, the world-wide web has now reached the limits of the platform. These great applications that we have are still fragmented and inconsistent when they could be interconnected and co-operative.
The new web will be a platform that simply joins up all the functions and data with a new network of connections below the application level, enabling a new generation of applications that will make life easier, more productive, safer. and more fun.
Searching today’s fragmented web
Think how often you use an internet-based application to find something: content, recommendations, shopping, services, contact details, research, comparison…Remember: "The answer is out there!"
The right answer is nearly always out there – somewhere.- That person’s contact details do exist online
- There is a piece of software that does just what you need
- There is a company that sells the item you need at the right price
- Someone is trying to sell the sofa that’s perfect for your room
Most web applications are trying to match information to where that information is needed
The major problem is intrinsic to the Internet’s architecture: there is no center. The lack of center is the reason why the web has become so useful so quickly – it has enabled free, organic growth.But it also means that any time we try to compare information, we have to try to collect information in one place – such as on a single database. That’s difficult on the web, although there are partial successes, see below:
Examples of the fragmented web
- Ebay has a huge database of people selling stuff, which it matches to people looking for stuff
- Google has a massive index of web page content, which it matches to search phrases
- Friends Reunited has a database of where people went to school
- Car Harbor is a solution (currently in development) that will match people looking for car parking with people who have free space to rent
- Loads of dating sites have databases of people wanting to find people who want to find people
- LinkedIn has a database of businesspeople’s information, and links between them
- They all try to match information with needs-for-information
- They all have their own databases that contain a small proportion of the information out there
- And their scope is limited to only the data they hold themselves
This means they can only try to find the best answer to what you need with the information available.
It doesn’t matter how much bigger or smarter these systems get, they’re limited by the fragmented web version 1.0. Google or Ask.com will never be able to know what you really want when you search for "home run". This is because the current web is still locked into reductionism. Because all these applications are just part of a disconnected world of data, they’re forced to reduce everything to their basic component parts.
Case study
You want to find someone to come in and help clean your house.
Now, there’s someone living half a block away who would be perfect for the job.
But…
If you use a search engine to search for "Cleaner Chesterfield", what do you get? Absolutely nothing of any use! Google returns about 248,000 results, which are useless to me!Now, there’s someone living half a block away who would be perfect for the job.
But…
- They won’t have a web site advertising their services
- They won’t be in the Yellow Pages or on other listings guides
- They promote their services only via word of mouth
- They have done similar work for a neighbor of yours whom you don’t know
I don’t want 248,000 results! I want one good one!
The search engine has taken the information I provided, and it has done its best. I don’t blame Google – its algorithms are very powerful. It’s just that power isn’t enough to solve this problem.
What’s needed is a new way of looking at the problem – a new system that appreciates the context of my query, not just the words I use. "
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