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 Search Computing website now features 3 additional demonstration videos. The first video demonstrates the Bioinformatic search computing scenario, and it is accessible here.

The remaining 2 videos are the results of a concept design made by 3 Politecnico di Milano students ( Lorenzo Ameri, Marco La Mantia, and Simone Paoli). The application is an “Evening Planner”, and its videos are available here and here.

A screenshot of the Evening Planner demonstration video

The new Search Computing Web site is online!

The Search Computing Web site is the main source of information for the Search Computing project, and it  features:

• A brand new section dedicated to demonstrators, where you canfind several demonstration videos of the prototypes developed within the project, plus access to some live demonstrators
• Slides, pictures and audio footage of the second Search Computing Workshop, held in Milano and Como, Italy, on May 25-31, 2010. The workshop targeted several “hot topics” of the project, with roughly 50 participants (50% invited and 50% SeCo), including Ricardo Baeza-Yates from Yahoo!, Paolo Boldi, Gabriella Pasi, Roberto Verganti, Tommaso Buganza, Sonia Bergamaschi, Laura Po, Francesco Guerra, and Domenico Beneventano, Fabian Suchanek, Georg Gottlob, Sergio Flesca, Florian Daniel, Fabio Casati, Imran Muhammad, Dana Florescu, Donald Kossmann, Norman Paton, Neoklis Polyzotis, Ihab F. Ilyas, Frank Valentin, Paolo Missier, Angela Bachi, Paolo Romano, Luciano Milanesi, Marta Corubolo, etc.
• A whole section dedicated to the book “Search Computing Challenges and Directions”, edited by Stefano Ceri, Marco Brambilla (Springer LNCS, Vol. 5950, March 2010).
• Theses and open positions within the project, plus a lot of additional material like the slides of the MS course on Search Computing at Politecnico di Milano, publications and so on.

Check it out at: www.search-computing.org