Web inventor says Google could be left in the dust

London (England) – Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web (sorry Al Gore fans), claims next generation web technology companies could surpass Google. In an interview with the Times Online, Berners-Lee said data mashups from Google and other companies are just the tip of the iceberg and that future websites will be able to connect almost any data.

Credited with inventing the protocols behind the World Wide Web back in 1989, Berners-Lee says the web of the future will be a so-called “semantic web” where everything can be linked. He says this futurist web would automatically recognize street addresses and immediately bring up a map – in contrast to having to manually open Google Maps and type in an address.

Berners-Lee has been advocating a semantic web for several years now and back in 2001 he co-authored an article in the journal Scientific America titled “The Semantic Web”. In the article he describes a future web where URLs could point to physical devices and not just websites.

Read the Times Online interview here.