Wolfram Alpha has, inevitably, been repeatedly compared to Google. Of course: just like the fatally overhyped search engine Cuil, Wolfram Alpha was previewed for sympathetic press, who, with help from all sorts of other media, quickly raised expectations to unmeetable levels (a long and storied tech-industry tradition).

Wolfram is attempting to almost magically deduce useful, precise information from the mess of information that is the World Wide Web. That's a task that has thus far eluded even the scientist who invented the WWW itself, Tim Berners-Lee, who has spent more than a decade on a crusade to do basically the same thing through a system he calls the "Semantic Web."

In its present state, Wolfram Alpha excels at providing information people don't care about, like "How far will the Earth be from the Sun tomorrow?" or "the average body mass index of a 40-year-old male, whether the Eiffel Tower is taller than Seattle's Space Needle, and whether it is high tide in Miami right now." Try asking something more complicated and you get an error message like the one at left (Google might get this one wrong, but at least it tries!)

Will Wolfram Alpha ever improve? Sure, but it's hard to imagine it ever improving enough to be truly useful; human language itself lacks the precision to enable what Wolfram is attempting. Or so it would seem. As social tech professor and author Clay Shirky has written, "Actual human expression must take into account the ambiguities of the real world, where people, even those with real taste, disagree about what is interesting or affected..."

For now, people of real taste disagree about the fate of Wolfram Alpha. But those sorts of opinions have a way of converging as a startup's fate becomes more clear.

(UPDATE: Comments enabled; they were off due to a tech glitch.)

What is the Semantic Web? Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, came up with the notion in 2001 as a followup to his hypertext creation. After "Web 2.0" became synonymous with cool kids hanging out at Mission Wi-Fi cafes putting rounded corners on websites, people adopted "Web 3.0" as a name for the Semantic Web movement. Business 2.0 attempted an explanation a few years ago:

[The Web is] basically a compendium of billions of text documents designed to be read by humans. You can search it for keywords, but the results aren't much use until you sort through them to find the page that has the info you want.

To take the Web to the next level — to move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 — the information in those documents will have to be turned into data that a machine can read and evaluate on its own. Only then will computers be able to take over tasks we now do by hand: find the nearest restaurant, book the best flight, buy the cheapest CD.

What does this have to do with Alan Meckler, you ask? Absolutely nothing! But we're sure he will come up with some cheaply produced website staffed by talentless hacks to write drivel about it.

(Video still via Beet.tv)

Poor photo-search technology, obviously. If only it had spent millions of dollars laboriously tagging its morgue with metadata! That's exactly the kind of service one semantic Web success, SchemaLogic, provides for the Associated Press. Before, we all wished you'd stop telling us how the Semantic Web was Web 3.0. Now you can make your case with Ashley Dupré nude pictures — and we're all listening.

Radar Networks, a semantic-Web pioneer, wants to bestow intelligent search and linking upon the Internet. Planning a trip to Vegas? You'll instantly know who in your network lives there, where they work, their favorite casinos and whether they wear boxers or briefs. Radar's client software, masked as a digital life organizer, will be able to ferret out all your engagements and use them to plot out everything from your next doctor's appointment to tomorrow's Happy Hour. Or, one day, in a future version, conspire to kill you if you're not maximizing your life potential.

Search engine Spock is, similarly, just at the beginning of its ultracreepy potential. The newly launched people-finder has already been stirring up concerns over personal privacy. While every tidbit of personal info it gathers was willingly surrendered to various social networks, the information was scattered across multiple sites. Now that it's all in one place, it's easily compiled for various nefarious ends. Standards for metadata, the big kahuna of Web 3.0, just promises to make things easier for Web-scouring sites like Spock.

The problem with Spock and the greater ideal of a semantic Web is the continued need for human input. Intelligent tags for metadata don't magically appear. Humans need to establish the relationships between data points. Even Spock claims to rely on users to ensure personal data is correct. Spock is going to have a hard time keeping tabs of all 6 billion people. How exactly is a semantic Web going to manage a world's worth of data? Wikipedia can barely keep itself straight.

The really scary thing is if they actually manage to do the job. If the Semantic Web becomes real, we're all surely doomed. It's just a matter of time before the computers figure out they don't need us. So thanks a lot, Spock and Radar, for working towards a better, humanity-less tomorrow.

Bill Gates' Road Ahead
Now here's a punch in the face. Microsoft's founder predicted a world of "wallet PCs" that could make everyday transactions, hold personal info, and work as little phone-computers in his 1995 book The Road Ahead. The book came with a CD-ROM, which included video of people using these wallet PCs to, say, pay for ice cream in the park.

Gates was looking for a version of convergence, the idea that technologies will meet and the gadgets we carry around will take over each other's functions until one convergent device can do everything. That's arguably what happened with the desktop computer, which can mix sound and video, send letters, calculate budgets, and all those other things John Hodgman and Justin Long do in the Mac ads.

Gates figured all this activity would take place on MSN, Microsoft's network (which included Hotmail and MSN Messenger). But then came the internet, in which Microsoft is just another player. Meanwhile, phones have gotten cameras, media players and internet access, making them the convergent device. And the most sublime of the smartphones? The Apple iPhone, a media-playing wifi-enabled computer-that-happens-to-be-a-phone made by Gates's nemesis Steve Jobs. The bonus: Apple's iPhone will use applications from Microsoft's other big competitors, Google and Yahoo. [Background]

The Semantic Web
The granddaddy of stillborn internets, the Semantic Web was supposed to be machine-readable, so that computers as well as humans could understand relationships between information. This would rescue humans from the tasks of categorizing and searching for data.

This involved a lot of "metadata," which is now enriching Web 2.0 sites (see below) thanks to — wait for it — humans categorizing and searching for data. Flickr tags, Facebook relationships, MySpace favorites — these all in some way fulfill the dream of the semantic web. [Background]

Cyberspace
One conceit of hacker sci-fi (and the Hollywood movies that dumbed it down) was that the internet would become a virtual world full of hip hackers wrangling with metaphorically represented data. Author William Gibson dubbed it "cyberspace" in his book Neuromancer.

The problem is that hackers enjoy the exact opposite: typing white text on black screens. The closest anyone's come is Second Life, a virtual world that mainly gets hacked through replicating objects. Methinks the sci-fi authors of ages past weren't hoping for flying dick attacks. [Cyberspace]

Bruce Sterling's Magical Spime World
Sci-fi author Bruce Sterling coined the term "spime," meaning an object that can be tracked through space and time thanks to embedded technology. The best way to visualize it is like this: Imagine googling "Where are my shoes?" and getting an answer. (I blogged one of Sterling's spime speeches last year at the SXSW conference.) Sterling may seem like the L. Ron Hubbard of futurism by buying into his own sci-fi, but give him another decade or two. RFID technology could make spimes a reality. [Background]

Web 2.0
Okay, Web 2.0 — the collaborative iteration of the web that lets users treat it like a platform, as explained by tech publisher Tim O'Reilly — only "never happened" in the sense that philosopher Jean Baudrillard said, "The Gulf War did not take place." Web 2.0 is not being built so much as it is evolving out of Web 1.0 as site-makers make their tools more sophisticated and internet users fill it with content.

Also like the Gulf War, reporters are mucking up the history of Web 2.0. The companies making Web 2.0 possible aren't just Flickr and its partners in a Newsweek cover story. Sites like Craigslist, Metafilter, and thousands of internet forums have been doing this stuff since the 90s. And what internet nerd didn't have a Geocities homepage back in the day? Other Web 1.0 sites have "upgraded" too: Amazon now uses tagging, wikis, and an ecosystem of commenters to add value to its sale pages. [Background]

The blogger's main premise was as follows: The Semantic Web, a logic-based version of the Internet (and an old idea), could render Google obsolete with an artificial intelligence system that provides real answers instead of keyword-based responses.

Sure it could, if Google didn't plan to innovate for the next decade. Google has five advantages that will keep all but the most determined innovators from beating it to artificial intelligence.

• Google knows semantics. Its entire business drives it toward pulling meaning from context. Better semantics make better ad placement and more precise search results. That's the reasoning behind contextual ads, topical search results, and the closely guarded and ever-changing search algorithm.
• Google has the smartest people in the world. Or damn close to it. Google's increasingly discriminating hiring process weeds out all but the top engineers — executives are fond of saying that Google only hires people smarter than half its employees. As one tech exec said, "Yahoo's morning bus may have wifi, but it doesn't have any PhD's on it."
• Google has Marissa Mayer. All "Marissa is a robot" jokes aside, Senior VP Marissa Mayer, one of the most powerful Google executives after founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is a titan of artificial intelligence. For her Bachelor's and Master's at Stanford, she specialized in A.I., and she holds several patents in the field. Her knowledge will not be lost in her role as Google's product gatekeeper — it's Marissa who decides what products are ready for release.
• Google is filthy rich. And don't think clickfraud will bring them down — today, Google launches GBuy, a payment system that trumps pay-per-click advertising with pay-per-sale, meanwhile bringing in the dollars of would-be buyers who don't trust vendors, but do trust Google. All this income gives Google a lot more room to play than its most ambitious competitors.
• Google says it's working on AI. The co-founders already said that they're building a sharper artificial intelligence. Their new ambient sound translator can already identify a TV show from five seconds of computer-captured sound. Google plans to use the system for even more contextualized ads and content. Why this isn't the biggest tech news of the year is a mystery.
• Google is not distracted. The company's major competitors are Microsoft and Yahoo. The former is plagued by unwieldy plans for an operating system, software suite, and struggling media network. The latter is approaching media company status with an expanding network of original and outsourced content. While both Microsoft and Yahoo are making valuable progress in other fields, neither is innovating in search anywhere near the rate of Google. That's why over the past year, Google is the only engine with a growing market share in the U.S., and why Google could soon become China's top engine as well. And Google will stay on top — by beating everyone else to the world's first global A.I. system.

Refuted: Wikipedia 3.0: The end of Google? [Evolving Trends]