Now we get to Web 3.0. These are semantically enriched websites. And no, this is not the “semantic web.” I always like to point out that I’ve been living through this for the past 30 years, and every year someone says, “Oh, this is the semantic web.” One day they’ll actually figure out what that thing really is. Until then, they just keep talking about it.
So here, when I say Web 3.0, I mean semantically rich websites, personalized search results, and—most importantly—the idea that the human is no longer the only consumer of a webpage. We have to construct the content that’s shown in the browser not just for a human being, but also for search engines, ad engines, and all these other systems that are trying to process and understand it.
Later on, I’ll talk more about topic modeling. The key idea here is that when I do a search, I’m not just searching with a single keyword. The search is based on my entire history.
When I say I’m searching for “Python,” I’m not just looking for the word python as a keyword on a page. You have to bring all of me along with that search—the fact that I’ve looked up programming languages, variables, AI, machine learning, and all kinds of related topics. But it’s not as simple as saying, “Oh, he must be a computer science person, so give him computer science results.” It doesn’t work like that.
Instead, the system looks at everything: every word I’ve typed, everything I’ve looked at, everything I’ve liked or spent time on. Then it asks, of all the possible results, which one is most related to me? That’s personalization.
And that same idea applies to websites. This is why when all of you do a search, you’ll get different results than I do. Your entire history comes along with the query. Because of that, when we create our webpages, we have to understand that these engines are actively trying to process and interpret what the page is really about—not just display it to a human.