The Semantic Web blossoms beyond the need to infer meaning from bodies of text. If the information on the web becomes more structured, structured beyond the need for Google.
If web pages and web services were to all completely expose their information as RDF and embed rich metadata inside bodies of text the need for Google's fancy AI and Entity extraction would be none.
Google's bread and butter is advertising. That advertising is driven from their search domination - their ability to extract meaning from web pages and match that meaning up to searched terms. Semantic web completely commoditizes that function - if you can crawl, you can search.
The Semantic Web depends on having everyone who writes web pages also categorize them. Whenever you have 20 different people categorizing content you're going to get 20 different interpretations of what the semantics mean. The vision of a decent, consistent categorization emerging across the web is a pipe dream.
Furthermore the fundamental problem that Google solves is not finding content. It is narrowing in on worthwhile content. In a world filled with people pushing commercial content with a dubious value proposition, you can't depend on content creators to provide an accurate assessment of their quality. That's where Google comes in. They not only categorize, they rank data well enough that end users are happy to accept the results.
Much of the web is databases with a thin layer on top, and the whole point of the SW/LD architecture is that different sites don't need to agree on ontology; it just becomes an alternate, aggregatable database view, in a sense.
I think a lot of the SW hype's overblown - and I've worked in the field - but you're attacking something which doesn't exist.
While it may not exist, there are still people who promote the possibility. In particular the person I am responding to subscribes to the vision enough to believe that some day the user supplied categorization will be sufficient to make Google unnecessary.
Surely a company like Google, filled with a ton of smart people who deal with the web every day and have a little bit of free rein to go crazy with it, will have some idea of what to do when - or if - the Semantic Web ever takes off.
Sure, their immediate ad-driven revenue model might break, but I very much doubt this would be an overnight change, nor one Google is not already thinking about.
If web pages and web services were to all completely expose their information as RDF and embed rich metadata inside bodies of text the need for Google's fancy AI and Entity extraction would be none.
Google's bread and butter is advertising. That advertising is driven from their search domination - their ability to extract meaning from web pages and match that meaning up to searched terms. Semantic web completely commoditizes that function - if you can crawl, you can search.