From my previous post I mulled on somewhat of a history and the founding principle of web search today. But as we will see shortly, web search has taken on new dimensions and has broadened it’s scope and horizon beyond what was initially conceptualized as what web search is all about! I tend to think that there are several reasons for this:
First of all, the realization that all that search was thought to be is not all that search is. Search was thought to be confined within the walls of web pages, but that is really a mis-conception. Web pages are merely a sort of carrier for the real treasure… INFORMATION. And that’s what people are looking for really, the value of a web page is content, the value of a map is content, the value of books is content, what kind of content? Well, video, audio, photos… content… informational content! So we have a phenomena where all of a sudden the search giants are not looking only at providing search for just web pages but video and maps and all manner of other things, that’s why we have GoogleMaps, Google Earth, Yahoo Maps…. and all that.
Content drives the web!
Secondly, i think demand has had something to do with it. The fact that there is a public and that public wants to find content that is somewhere on the web and they will use only what will get them what they want (or closest to what they want) fastest and with ease. In other words, relevance. Great content is really neat, but relevant content is what it’s all about. That’s why PageRank is really awesome cause it takes the relevance bull by the horns. And because the public wants more and relevant content a need is created that is continuously being explored and solved (in parts) very creatively.
Well, how about we look at some of these neat new innovations in search…
Yahoo Mindset: This is an exploration into how Machine Learning can be applied to the search problem. A product of Yahoo Research, Mindset is all about thinking outside the box. The idea revolves around broadly categorizing search results as either commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources). The user is presented with a slide-bar which can be used to sort all the results on a scale from highly informational links to highly commercial links. For example if I searched for ‘John Adams’ I would probably expect sites that sell John Adams books or Economics books on one extreme of the scale and websites that provide economic information, tutorials and other material about John Adams and his work on the other end of the spectrum. Here are some links that discuss Yahoo Mindset in more detail:
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000114.html
Google’s Experimental Search: I tend to think that the drive behind this innovation is to enhance the experience of the user. So that you don’t have to click on almost every link returned in the search results to find out more and to increase the relevance of the search results. Ideally, using this tool I would expect that the search results’ page in itself can give me more information and to add more relevance to the search results. You could think of snippets under the links returned in the search results as a primitive form of what is intended in Experimental Search; so that now, instead of just a snippet with the key words highlighted, you get time-lines, maps and more contextual information to the left and the right of the search results.
This is quite interesting because it is a… (what’s the word… aaaaah… ok i can’t get the right word, it’s one of those in-my-mind-not-in-my-mind things). It is a complete overhaul of the concept we attach to a results page. A results page is traditionally thought of as a pointer of sorts, it points to places where you can get the content you are looking for. But then, here is a situation where the results page is actually a source of content in itself, you can learn things and get content on the results page itself! Interesting!
Here are some articles on Microsoft’s progress in search technology:
