After a presentation about the Semantic Web today by Tim Berners-Lee, Google's Peter Norvig took to the microphone to engage in a brief discussion.

I think Dr. Norvig brings up several excellent points.

1) Lack of knowledge of how the web works by the webmaster who needs to implement this stuff. Just like the quality of cataloging in a library can vary, even with skilled and well trained catalogers, the same is even more true here. Those of us who follow web search closely forget that many (most?) webmasters have little skill and the same goes for the typical searcher.

2) Competition. Why do we need to standardize

and finally

3) what the article calls "deception," what others might call the gaming of the search engines. From the article:

"The third problem is one of deception. We deal every day with people who try to rank higher in the results and then try to sell someone Vi*g*a when that’s not what they are looking for. With less human oversight with the Semantic Web, we are worried about it being easier to be deceptive,” Norvig said."

The rest of the article includes a rejoinder from TB-L but he does agree with Dr. Norvig that “deception” is an issue.

Both Norvig's and TB-L's comments show that "deception" or gaming or plain ol' web spam are major issues for all engines.

Sorry abou that folks, here's the link to the full article from News.com,
http://news.com.com/Google+exec+challenges+Berners-Lee/2100-1025_3-6095705.html