Or at least what John Markoff of the New York Times calls Web 3.0 – a trumped up term for the Semantic Web. I was at the South African Google briefing this morning where, in answer to one of my questions, Douglas Merrill, VP of Engineering said Google doesn’t see much value in semantics for its search. According to Merril, the Google search is syntactic rather than semantic and this works well for them. There are, of course, several levels to the application of semantics and I assume restructuring Google’s indexing AI from syntactic to semantic is simply too big a project for arguably less gain.

The kink in Google’s armor however, may well be that their syntactic analysis may not work out for them in the long term if the majority of the Web starts using Semantic relations to express meaning. I suspect Merril was saying that there is little value in semantics as a part of the backbone of the search but this doesn’t mean Google won’t index semantics or output results semantically in the future.

Merril also said that Amazon Web Services have been a great product for Amazon but that Google is “comfortable with search” right now. This could mean one of two things: either Google is comfortable enough with search to branch out into the same space as AWS at some stage, or it means Google plans to stick with its core competency, which is search. Of course one could always ask, of AWS, why a book-seller is getting into the ISP business in the first place. Despite the glitch this weekend, AWS has revolutionized the way web application developer plan and deploy scalable systems but it is still a radical departure from the company’s core business.