Link - http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/technology/09data.html

The contemporary notion that technology becomes obsolete as quickly as it’s developed has been applicable to many thing from processors to mp3 players, but not to the core of internet usability and ebusiness commerce - web searching. Historically web searching has been done by querying a search engine that has a repository of sites it has searched and it returns the websites that match the query, based on advertisements, popularity, and relevance. The problem with this classical model is that there is very little relational measurement among queries made and little structure.
As Esther Dyson mentions, “Most search engines are about algorithms and statistics without structure, while databases have been solely about structure until now.” The opportunities from this movement would affect users minimally, but aid in automated searches and help with such possibilities like automatic localization of equipment, intelligent devices, as well as advanced integration of previously isolated ideas and technologies. The relevance to what we’re studying in Networks has to do with taking hyperlinking and other passive links and transforming them into relational ties like in a social networks and using these elements of bridges and closure to make these searches more accurate and relevant. Although these ideas aren’t mentioned explicitly, through the use of databasing ideas and technologies, these outcomes would be expected and take unidirectional linking as discussed in class with bigger websites being linked by smaller ones and making these ties bidirectional based on relevance within the query and based on how the results are in the database.
Personally, I feel this is a terrific idea not only for programmers and those who deal with automatic retrieval of search data, but those wanting smarter devices and are annoyed with seemingly inane problems with technology, such as setting one’s location with a remote or having a device know what service it’s using or should expect to use (like in ISP, cable, etc.). It is also a noble effort, like Wikipedia, to make information this powerful freely accessible and public, for the most part; it should effect the growth of metaverse-like (as in Second Life) worlds where there are many things that occur behind the scenes that are automated and in need of such a relational database for the internet.