Now imagine what it would be like if instead of using our algorithms we relied on the news suppliers to put in all the right metadata and label their stories the way they wanted to. "Is my story a story that's going to be buried on page 20, or is it a top story? I'll put my metadata in. Are the people I'm talking about terrorists or freedom fighters? What's the definition of patriot? What's the definition of marriage?"

Just defining these kinds of ontologies when you're talking about these kinds of political questions rather than about part numbers; this becomes a political statement. People get killed over less than this. These are places where ontologies are not going to work. There's going to be arguments over them. And you've got to fall back on some other kinds of approaches.

The best place where ontologies will work is when you have an oligarchy of consumers who can force the providers to play the game. Something like the auto parts industry, where the auto manufacturers can get together and say, "Everybody who wants to sell to us do this." They can do that because there's only a couple of them. In other industries, if there's one major player, then they don't want to play the game because they don't want everybody else to catch up. And if there's too many minor players, then it's hard for them to get together.

Semantic technologies are good for essentially breaking up information into chunks. But essentially you get down to the part that's in between the angle brackets. And one of our founders, Sergey Brin, was quoted as saying, "Putting angle brackets around things is not a technology by itself." The problem is what goes into the angle brackets. You can say, "Well, my database has a person name field, and your database has a first name field and a last name field, and we'll have a concatenation between them to match them up." But it doesn't always work that smoothly.