A big issue with the semantic web is ontologies – the use of consistent definitions to concepts. For those that don’t understand what I’m talking about – essentially, the next evolution of the web is about making content readable by not just humans but also machines. However for a machine to understand something it reads, it needs consistent definitions. Human’s for example, are intelligent – they understand that the word “friend” is also related to the word “acquaintance”, but a computer would treat them to mean two different things. Or do they?<\/p>\n
Just casually looking at some of my web analytics, I noticed some people landed on my site by doing a google search for how many acquaintances do people have<\/a>, which took them to a popular posting of mine about how many friends people have on facebook<\/a>. I’ve had a lot of visitors because of this posting, and its been an interesting case study for me on how search engines work. However today was something different from other times: I found the word acquaintance weird. I know I didn’t use that word in my posting – and when I went to the Google cache<\/a> I realised something interesting: because someone linked to me using that word, the search engine replaced the word ‘friend’ with ‘acquaintances’.<\/p>\n
![\"acquaintances\"](\"http:\/\/farm2.static.flickr.com\/1012\/1239318480_356524494f.jpg\")
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