an entry from

Piotr's R&D blog

Amazon has folded in searching book content into their search engine. Library catalogs, already painful to use compared to full-text Google search, have now become completely irrelevant. (Warning: That was a future-looking statement, based on increasing the content index coverage to a large percentage of published books.) I think this will also reduce the importance of subject ontologies and other explicit metadata, since modern indexing and clustering mechanisms can extract most of that information from the text itself. Extrapolating further, is an explicit Semantic Web a misguided attempt, and we should all rather be working on natural language understanding algorithms?

Addendum: Wired's article about this.