When the Web is Sort of Correct, Pt. 2

Finally, my update to Sarah Palin’s topic page on Freebase is reflected on Powerset!

A few weeks ago, right after the Palin VP pick was announced, I complained that her Freebase topic was far from complete. As an experiment, I updated her topic page and began checking to see how long it would take for the new information to be aggregated out to a semantic search engine using Freebase data.

A few weeks may not be that long. But consider that a search engine like Powerset with a tiny user base may be acquired, and their engine ported to a much more popular site.

This is actually the case. Powerset has been acquired - by Microsoft - and is now underway with a rolling release on Live.com. That means that a few weeks in lag actually does make a big difference in the tweet-speed news cycle. This is a perfect example of why the Freebase platform would surely be enhanced through a Gnip-style push model, where remote datastores could be updated with little difficulty or overhead.

There’s nothing like the satisfaction of bringing new data to light. It’s a similar feeling to the one you get when you see a webpage you made in the top results for a Google search. But semantic search doesn’t require you to make web pages, if you’re itching to add to the collective pool of wisdom. You just have to update some property values, and that just takes a few seconds.

And it’s quite addictive. Picture what most people would have responded fifteen years ago if you described the imminent popularity of social news sites, or five years ago about the popularity of social networks. As the semantic graph begins propagating out, I think all the casual games out there are going to start seeing some more nutritious competition.