Clay Shirky
clearly describes the rise of
ol’ style AI
in his article
The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview
. A quotation:

After 50 years of work, the performance of machines designed to think about the world the way humans do has remained, to put it politely, sub-optimal. The Semantic Web sets out to address this by reversing the problem. Since it’s hard to make machines think about the world, the new goal is to describe the world in ways that are easy for machines to think about.

I’ve done my
own searching
for a new style of knowledge storage and processing
but the solution for artificial intelligence (little “a”, little “i”) is still illusive.
The
Semantic Web
is an interesting implementation of
frame based/ontology AI
using the web but it does not bring anything more to the cognition party
than any of the previous several decades of AI work.

Meta-data is an interesting addition to the web and having a
standard way
to navigate the structured meta-data makes new things possible,
but computers “thinking” about information on the web is still
a ways off.