Dan Z asked: 'but could it become 'good enough' for most
(non-academic/research) uses?'
I think the lines are a bit blurry when it comes to deciding whether
something is good enough for any particular use, even including
academic or informed research.
As has already been pointed out, there is a 'danger' (I use the term
loosely) of things being understood as fact or otherwise based in some
reality - but this is more an issue with the information currently
available on the web than the mechanisms used to retrieve it. I am
very much taken with the idea behind this experiment but, unless
Google can do something very clever indeed, this form of combining
information will always be problematic because, seemingly, there is no
clear way of discerning how the results have been combined (from a
layman's perspective).
For some general, what I might call non-inquisitorial searches, I got
some good results (and others a load of nonsense but I understand it
is early days)
History Southampton (only three results)
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=history+southampton
Royal Indian Navy (quite impressed at this one but have not been able
to 'fact check' it...)
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=royal+Indian+Navy
Greek vases (very odd... picking out 'year of death')
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=greek+vases
Byzantine emperors (inconsistent results, and largely thanks to
Wikipedia that this worked)
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=Byzantine+emperors
Best wishes,
Tehmina
2009/6/4 Richard Light <[log in to unmask]>:
> In message <[log in to unmask]>, Dan Zambonini
> <[log in to unmask]> writes
>
>> Google have always talked about avoiding explicit 'semantic' data, and
>> have
>> concentrated on extracting data from normal text.
>
> You reckon? I think they are hedging their bets:
>
> http://rdfa.info/2009/05/12/google-announces-support-for-rdfa/
>
> Richard
> --
> Richard Light
>
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--
Tehmina Goskar, MA AMA
[log in to unmask]
Historical and Museum Research
Web Communication and Learning Development
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