Search Computing Blog

In a recent blog post, Jim Jansen discusses about the outcomes of an expert study, funded by Microsoft, about the future of search.

The Future of Search

The study, which involved 54 search experts from U.S., EMEA and Asia, is available here; it contains the following major findings, all related with the Search Computing goals:

• Search will increasingly structure a wider range of data (social, UGC, video).
• Users want more than links to sites and documents with matching key words. They expect the engine to figure out what they really need.
• Aggregation of Data Silos: the search silo (index, history) will merge with other silos (social, location, purchase info, rich media, mobile apps) to give users what they want in fewer clicks.
  • For a movie, you might want to show info from different silos – expert reviews, friends comments, show times.
• Search Engines must extract more value from social data, possibly using semantic/natural language, and cultural inference to understand what people are really seeking.
• Search will be more and more ubiquitously enacted (PC and mobile).
• Community participation will play a greater role in search quality, using the social graph as filter (as, for instance, in Blekko), or using UGC to augment search results.
• Search engines will shift towards providing personalized results that leverage user history and context.
• Search engines will become more conversational as they go back and forth with users to refine a user’s query.
• Specialized vertical search sites are growing: users use vertical websites and apps to get faster, more relevant and more streamlined results. Mobile vertical apps are becoming increasingly popular because they reduce the number of clicks required.
• Real-time search will grow, but not everything requires freshness: explosion of real time information via Facebook and Twitter will drive user demand for fresh and new data, but everything does not need to be fresh to be actionable and interesting.
  • Nice example: MIT Sensable Cities project allows users to access real time data streams captured via cell phones as they move in urban spaces http://senseable.mit.edu/.
• There will be a growth of different UI paradigms for displaying information that is more relevant to the context of specific search query.
• The results experience will move from text and links to visually rich results, surfacing, for example, maps, weather charts/tables and other visualization of data as part of the result.
• Q&A will be important, expecially when obtained through community building.

We thank Alan Dix for suggesting the source of this blog post.

The Open Data Protocol

This posts presents another initiative to open-up data sources by mean of standard Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON: the Open Data Protocol (OData).

OData (which seems to be mainly supported by Microsoft) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data. OData can be used to give access to a variety of sources, such as relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites.

continue reading…

Microsoft Live Labs recently launched  Pivot, a new tool to visually explore large sets of data. Gray Flake presented it at the latest TED Talk event.

continue reading…

Fast Search & Transfer ASA (recursive acronym FAST) is a Norwegian company based in Oslo. FAST focuses on data search technologies. It also has offices located in Germany, Italy, Sri Lanka, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, Mexico and other countries around the world. The company was founded in 1997.

On April 24, 2008, Microsoft closed its acquisition of FAST. FAST is now known as FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary.

FAST offers an enterprise search product, FAST ESP. ESP is a service-oriented architecture development platform which is geared towards production searchable indexes. It provides a flexible framework for creating ETL applications for efficient indexing of searchable content. Fast also offers a number of search-derivative applications, focused on specific search use cases, including publishing, market intelligence and mobile search. The Search Derivative Applications (SDA) are built upon the Enterprise Search Platform (ESP). The company is developing PHAROS, a new European multimedia search engine. FAST is notable for a major ongoing investigation by the Norwegian police into accounting fraud around the inflation of revenues and profits which has led to police raids on its offices.

[Source Wikipedia ]

[Website http://www.fastsearch.com/]

Powerset is a company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.

Powerset is working on building a natural language search engine that can find targeted answers to user questions (as opposed to keyword based search). For example, when confronted with a question of the form ‘which U.S. state has the highest income tax?’, conventional search engines ignore the question and instead do a search on the keywords ‘state, income and tax’. Powerset’s product, on the other hand, attempts to use natural language processing to understand the nature of the question and then to search and return a subset of the web that contains the answer to the question. If it works, results from Powerset’s search engine would have a higher relevance than results from a keyword search engine. From a commercial standpoint, advertising on the results page could also be more relevant and could have a higher revenue potential than that of keyword search engines.

Currently, the company is in the process of “building a natural language search engine that reads and understands every sentence on the Web.” The company has licensed natural language technology from PARC, the former Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

On May 11, 2008, the company unveiled a tool for searching a fixed subset of Wikipedia using conversational phrases rather than keywords.

On July 1, 2008, Microsoft signed an agreement to acquire Powerset

[Source Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_(company) ]

[Website http://www.powerset.com/]