Someday all links on the web will look like this link :

Hughw's Blog


The URL above is
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hughw+blog&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky; i.e. it's the result of a query. Google returns 302 FOUND with the redirect to http://www.hprscc.org/ in the Location header.

What's the big deal? Well, the link above will never break until Google does. This feature is precisely the reason Codd avoided handling pointers in the relational model. You never obtain a reference to a row in the relational model (and Oracle REFs are decidedly not relational). Instead, you can only specify rows by requiring column values to be equal, or in some other relation.

Someday query URLs we use may be more structured. We'll pass RDF queries to Google.

To treat the web as an information retrieval mechanism, these query URLs will be the only sensible way to store references in web pages! Today, every site has broken links, even to pages under its own control.

Hmm, Google will crawl pages and discover links that call its own search function... weird... there is a recursive issue there, for them to solve :)