You'd think that people at Google would be grateful to Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the World Wide Web. But nooooo. Google executive Peter Norvig doesn't think much of Berners-Lee's latest big idea, the so-called "Semantic Web," which is an attempt to make Web pages easily understandable by computers so that they can handle more of our day-to-day transactions in a standardized way.

Norvig claims that Berners-Lee's concept is flawed, because most webmasters aren't competent enough to handle the extra programming that the Semantic Web would require -- and those that can handle it would likely use the Semantic Web deceptively, much as people already try to trick search engines into directing Web traffic to their pages.

We've got a different take on Norvig's stance, however: Google's specialty is taking regular Web pages and processing them so that they're easily understandable by computers -- Google's computers, that is. Berners-Lee's Semantic Web would make it easy for anyone to find information on the Web, not just Google. No wonder Google isn't fond of a technological leap that threatens its bread-and-butter business.

Valleywag's advice to Google: If you want to tangle with the inventor of the Web, bring out the inventor of the Internet -- Vint Cerf, who now serves as Google's chief Internet evangelist.