In the past I talked a lot about the future of the web, the Semantic Web, and what developers and businesses have to do to make it happen.

Many people are currently blogging about a new search engine called Vast. I took a quick look at it and found an impressive service. At the moment, it has semantic capabilities. It’s a normal search engine that crawls the web to search for specific data: cars, jobs, and profiles. It broadcasts this information using a REST interface and no semantic relations between the results are available.

So, why do I say that it is a model for the Semantic Web if it has nothing to do with semantics? Because it has a crucial characteristic needed by most of semantic web services to make the idea of the Semantic Web work.

I have already talked about it in this blog post: sharing its content and computations freely, to anyone who needs it, without any restrictions.

This is exactly what Vast is doing:

“Use the Vast Dataset to Build and Augment Your Own Services – it’s free, open, and available for commercial and non-commercial uses!”

“Vast’s entire dataset is available for you to add to your site, blog, or service. You can rebuild all of Vast.com, if you’d like, offer targeted classified search results to your users, build visualizations or mappings, or process the data to find interesting correlations.”

So, you have an idea, and you need their data to develop it – what will you do? Take the data from their web servers, without any restriction.

The only question you need to ask yourself is: do I trust their reliability to develop my project using their free service? The answer is up to you, and it’s the sort of question developers must repeatedly ask themselves – if a new environment consisting of such web services is emerging (and I think it is).

I also questioned myself on what could be the business model of such a Web service? They have a part of the answer:

“At some point, we will accept payment for advertising embedded in our feeds. At that time, the advertising revenues will of course be shared with developers and partners using our feeds.”

“When Vast decides to embed sponsored links or advertisements in the dataset, you must display these links or ads with prominence alongside or as part of the data. However, it is our plan that you will receive a share of the revenues that you help generate for doing so.”

As simple as crying rabbit. They embedded some sort of sponsored results in their results listing and they force you to display them with their terms of service.

However, who cares? I mean, I have no problem with ads as long as they are relevant to what I am searching for. If their service suggests to me a car found somewhere on the Web or a car result sponsored by someone else, as long as I have a car that fill my needs I do not care where it came from and it is exactly what Vast is doing.

I can only say one thing at this point: congratulations guys for making all your data freely available to anybody, and for having built a viable business model (in my humble opinion) over it.

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