Being a fan of increased intelligence on the web, including Bing’s use of Powerset and True Knowledge, I enjoyed cnet’s report, “Google search gets answer highlights and events.”
Google now shows the following “The Empire State Building rises to 1250 ft (381 m) at the 102nd floor” in response to the classic semantic web test question.
Also, Google leverages more of the content of text or structure of linked data in its Rich Snippet answers:
As search engines increase their understanding of concepts and how to extract them from content or linked data and present them as Google does here or above in a sentence, the web will begin to feel a lot smarter.
As these simple enhancements indicate, the intelligent web is taking off and that feeling of intelligence will come sooner than expected. Of course, there is a long way to go. For more on that, I here there is an upcoming issue of AI Magazine that will survey the state of the art in question answering, including coverage of Vulcan’s Project Halo and IBM’s Jeopardy effort, among others. Also, if you are interested in what bright minds are looking forward to in this regard, see Nova Spivak’s recent blogging and his post on “will the web become conscious?”
I hope one day google opens up their knowledge base. I hear google has been working on AI research the last several years, so hopefully one day they will expose those tools and resources for others to use.