Beyond Search

Featured

What’s happening with search and retrieval? Google’s results irritate some; others are happy with Google’s shaping of information. Web competitors exist; for example, Kagi.com and Neva.com. Both are subscription services. Others provide search results “for free”; examples include Swisscows.com and Yandex.com. You can find metasearch systems (minimal original spidering, just recycling results from other services like Bing.com); for instance, StartPage.com (formerly Ixquick.com) and DuckDuckGo.com. Then there are open source search options. The flagship or flagships are Solr and Lucene. Proprietary systems exist too. These include the ageing X1.com and the even age-ier Coveo system. Remnants of long-gone systems are kicking around too; to wit, BRS and Fulcrum from OpenText, Fast Search now a Microsoft property, and Endeca, owned by Oracle. But let’s look at search as it appears to a younger person today.

A decayed foundation created via smart software on the Mage.space system. A flawed search and retrieval system can make the structure built on the foundation crumble like Southwest Airlines’ reservation system.

First, the primary means of access is via a mobile device. Surprisingly, the source of information for many is video content delivered by the China-linked TikTok or the advertising remora YouTube.com. In some parts of the world, the go-to information system is Telegram, developed by Russian brothers. This is a centralized service, not a New Wave Web 3 confection. One can use the service and obtain information via a query or a group. If one is “special,” an invitation to a private group allows access to individuals providing information about open source intelligence methods or the Russian special operation, including allegedly accurate video snips of real-life war or disinformation.

The challenge is that search is everywhere. Yet in the real world, finding certain types of information is extremely difficult. Obtaining that information may be impossible without informed contacts, programming expertise, or money to pay what would have been called “special librarian research professionals” in the 1980s. (Today, it seems, everyone is a search expert.)

Here’s an example of the type of information which is difficult if not impossible to obtain:

• The ownership of a domain
• The ownership of a Tor-accessible domain
• The date at which a content object was created, the date the content object was indexed, and the date or dates referenced in the content object
• Certain government documents; for example, unsealed court documents, US government contracts for third-party enforcement services, authorship information for a specific Congressional bill draft, etc.
• A copy of a presentation made by a corporate executive at a public conference.

I can provide other examples, but I wanted to highlight the flaws in today’s findability.

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Interviews

Chris Westphal is the Chief Analytics Officer of DataWalk, a firm providing an investigative and analysis tool to commercial and government organizations. The 12-minute interview covers DataWalk’s unique capabilities, its data and information resources, and the firm’s workflow functionality. The video can be viewed on YouTube at this location.

Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2022