You know when you’re looking for a specific fact, a simple answer to a straightforward question, and the only option open to you is to throw together a few keywords and hope that the resulting snippets of pages contain the correct answer? It turns out some other people (a research organisation called True Knowledge) are irritated by this too, so they’re working on a system that can index knowledge rather than just pages on the Web. Not only that but the system can synthesize new knowledge from the facts it already knows. Near future, or space-age pipe dream? Either way, it’s fascinating.
The video is well worth watching to get an idea of what many people hope will be a reality in the medium term.