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I have no doubt that they do. How do you think they compare, numbers wise, to other topics?

I'm not so sure I think it is the semantic web that is at fault. Seems that it is as much consumption as anything else. The web, search, and related technologies are all keyed around what people are actively consuming today. If you have trouble finding something, that is mainly because not many other folks are also looking for the same thing.

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How many people, numbers wise, do you think were discussing particle physics? Yet, there we are: the Web was devised to foster such niche discussion and make the information in there easily findable and sharable amongst researchers. It just turned out that what Bernes-Lee & Cailliau came up with, could be applied to what the general public likes to talk about, too.

So I don’t believe that innovation in web and search technologies is keyed around what consumers want. Rather, it’s the other way around: more demanding use cases drive innovation, some of it can be repurposed and then gets fine-tuned thanks to the bigger R&D budgets that come with mass market application.

But the seed of innovation lays in the niches.

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