The pre-transaction experience today is still far from efficient and effective and unless you like to spend hours wading through all kinds of different sites and sift through their over abundance of mostly irrelevant information, it’s a frustrating experience.

Data today is dumb, which also means that the web is dumb. It has to get much smarter to present me as a user with content that is relevant to me. Don’t ask me to search! Ask me what I want and then bring me a relevant selection of choices. That’s the opposite of today’s travel search experience. I want to get the needle(s) and not the haystack.

That’s where the semantic web, which some will call web 3.0 – although it doesn’t matter what number it is given by some pundits – will make all the difference.

I think that this is something that will ultimately be driven by consumer demand (or at least a consumer preference for those sites that are able to utilise it) so eventually any hassle of implementing it will be outweighed by the losses of not implementing it.

I suspect that Google will play a role in this, if only because it will alter the current paradigm subtly and they will need to be best positioned to take advantage of that. In other words, if the internet is to be databased in such a way that we need to be ‘tag-able’ by other sites, then that might start to reduce our reliance on the current search model that Google does so well.

But back over to you – what can you see it being used for?

As much as it will be a pain for programmers to begin a double tagging of objects in their code, I am sure that if Google started to give priority to sites that embraced double tagging, we would see a rapid adaptation of the practice, and a richer net experience would result. Next 5 years?

~Phil