As a writer, it pains me to say this, but written language is one of the worst forms of communication available. It’s so difficult to write something that is supposed to convey a message to many people. The reason for this difficulty, is simply that we all think differently. The same words can mean completely different things to people. And since written languages are (mostly) static in nature, if a reader doesn’t understand something, they are quite simply SOL.
The same holds true for the web. Searching for topics based on words is very difficult to do. In fact, we have to often times train our brains to say: “if I were writing about subject X, what words would I use?”. If you are wrong, you either have to continue trying keywords that may or may not be correct or simply give up your search.
That’s why it is so interesting to me that Google recently acquired a company called Metaweb. I won’t go into too much detail, you can research it for yourself. But at it’s core, Metaweb keeps a database of “entities” and not words. These entities represent real things, such as people, places, objects and concepts…you know, the things we want to get information on. Metaweb then correlates other information that relates to these entities. This method of organization does not rely on written words which we all know can mean different things to different people. It should be interesting to see how Google will integrate this into their search engine.
