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Comment by roadside_picnic | Hacker News Reader

> Semantic web was a standard suggested by Google

Was this written by AI? I find it hard to believe anyone who was interested in Semantic Web would have not known it's origin (or at least that it's origin was not Google).

The concept of a Semantic web was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee (who hopefully everyone recognizes as the father of HTTP, WWW, HTML) in 1999 [0]. Google, to my knowledge, had no direct development or even involvement in the early Semweb standards such as RDF [1] and OWL [2]. I worked with some of the people involved in the latter (not closely though), and at the time Google was still quite small.

0. https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780062515872/mode/2up

1. https://www.w3.org/TR/PR-rdf-syntax/Overview.html

2. https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/

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That was a human-generated hallucination, my apologies. I always associated semantic web with something Google was pushing to assist with web crawling, and my first exposure to it was during the Web 2.0 era (early 2010s) as HTML5 was seeing adoption, and I always associated it with Google trying to enhance the web as the application platform of the future.

W3C of course deserves credit for their hard work on this standard.

My main point was that regardless of the semantic "standard", nothing prevented us from putting everything in a generic div, so complaining that everyone's just "not on board" isn't a useful lament.

"That was a human-generated hallucination"

Kudos. I respect this kind of honesty. I wish there was more of it.

The association isn't without merit.

Google acquired Metaweb Technologies in 2010, acquiring Freebase with it. Freebase was a semantic web knowledge base and this became deeply integrated into Google's search technology. They did, in fact, want to push semantic web attributes to make the web more indexable, even though they originated neither the bigger idea nor the original implementation.

(one of my classmates ended up as an engineer at Metaweb, then Google)

"I always associated semantic web with something Google was pushing to assist with web crawling, and my first exposure to it was during the Web 2.0 era (early 2010s) as HTML5 was seeing adoption, and I always associated it with Google trying to enhance the web as the application platform of the future."

This sounds more like "indexing" than "crawling"

The "Sitemaps 0.84" protocol , e.g., sitemap.xml, was another standard that _was_ introduced by Google

Helpful for crawling and other things

(I convert sitemap.xml to rss; I also use it to download multiple pages in a single TCP connection)

Not every site includes a sitemap, some do not even publish a robots.txt

Some ideas going back even further than that, like 1994:

https://philip.greenspun.com/research/shame-and-war-old

>was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee

he's actually still working on it: https://solidproject.org/

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