I have a love-hate relationship with Wikipedia. On one hand it is a great resource just chuck full of seemingly accurate information. On the other hand it has become so prominent in Google rankings that its pages normally hold the first or second slot on any single word search. This, in my opinion runs the risk of drowning out other great sources of information as there is a certain bias towards clicking the first result returned by Google. Plus everyone automatically links to Wikipedia so it is a self fulfilling prophecy. In 10 years the web will consist of social networking sites and Wikipedia (!).

I also have an issue as some of the major pages are edited by editors/dictators who rarely let anything get added to the page and control links out like they are gold (which they are due to the PR of Wikipedia pages - but still). It is almost as if Wikipedia is becoming no better than any other Encyclopedia as for the large majority of topics it is essentially a closed system.

That is why I love sites like the Uncyclopedia. It is nice to see someone poke fun at Big Brother.

Well, perhaps it sort of works. There was a interesting post on TechCrunch over the weekend which does a great job of summarizing some of the emerging thoughts on what will emerge after keyword searches (i.e. what every major search engine does).

One option that seems to have the best chance, at least in the short term of radically reworking how we search is the Semantic Web. At its core, the concept of a semantic web is nothing more than a focus on coding some intelligence into those billions of pages out there.

Right now when you design a web page, pretty much everything you do is about making it look good. There is nothing in the underlying code of the page that describes the actual content of the page. This makes it really difficult for search engines to figure out what is actually on the page so that it can be presented to someone who is looking for similar information. In semantic webs, the type of content on the page is also coded along with the visual components so that computers reading the content know what they are looking at.

This visually centric approach also gives rise to a whole industry of search engine optimization (SEO) consultants who employ “white hat” and “black hat” techniques to trick the search engines into either recognizing the content correctly, or in the case of black hatters, incorrectly.

As someone who has attempted to deploy various SEO strategies over at TravelGator, and for the most part has been completely confused at the results, I personally cannot wait for something like the semantic web to come along. As a publisher, I’d prefer to spend my time creating great content, not tweaking that content in an attempt to get the rather stupid Google robot to read it correctly.

In other words, I cannot wait.

For more details on semantic webs, check out the first chapter of Nova Spivak’s new book.