Google and the Semantic Web: About Quad Stores and URIs

Just recently Google launched another interesting service called “In Quotes”. It delivers quotes from stories linked to from Google News and users can compare opinions of e.g. politicians in a very comfortable way.

If  a closer look is taken at the system, one can see that any person whose quotes are listed has got a URI: Barack Obama has got the uniform “qsid” tPjE5CDNzMicmM.

It seems like “qsid” stands for “Quad Store ID” which would perfectly support such a URI based system.

Does Google slowly approximate to the Semantic Web?