Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Semantic Advertising = Long Tail Monetization (hakia.com)
7 points by prakash on Sept 12, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment


There's an assumption in this blog post that underpins a lot of semantic web stuff, even the biggies like Powerset: that people can, will and prefer to type out "correct" semantic queries versus simply throwing a few keywords into Google. Granted keyword searching is a bit of a skill and individual searches can often take some massaging to get the right info, but I'm not sure that everybody prefers to type out full questions instead.

On a related tangent: has anyone here ever had one of the semantic web search startups actually answer a question they had? I mean a real question, not a demo one cooked up to show off tailored results. I haven't, I even gave Powerset a try the last time I genuinely had a question - "are dogs carnivores?" - retarded example I know but I genuinely couldn't remember. Here's the results:

http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/are-dogs-carnivores%3F

Useless. Interestingly, the older mainstream search engines had no problem answering the question right in their search results - both Ask and Google even suggested various questions in a drop down and auto completed my query.

ask: http://tinyurl.com/4wu9z4

google: http://tinyurl.com/543t7h




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: