Stanford TAP: Google Cool that Trails Cuil
July 31, 2008
in the period from 2000 to 2002, Dr. Ramanathan Guha with the help of various colleagues and students at Stanford built a demonstration project call TAP. You can download a Power Point presentation here. I verified this link on July 30, 2008. Frankly I was surprised that this useful document was still available.
TAP was a multi-organization research effort. Participants included IBM, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon University.
Why am I writing about information that is at least six years old? The ideas set forth in the Power Point were not feasible when Dr. Guha formulated them. Today, the computational power of multi core processors coupled with attractive price-performance ratios for storage makes the demos from 2002 possible in 2008.
TAP was a project set up to unify islands of XML from disparate Web services. TAP also brushed against automatic augmentation of human-generated Web content.Working with Dr. Guha was Rob McCool, one of the developers of the common gateway interface. Mr. McCool worked at Yahoo, and he may still be at that company. Were he to leave Yahoo, he may want to join some of his former colleagues at Google or a similar company.
Now back to 2002.
One of TAP’s ambitious goals was to “make the Web a giant distributed database.” The reason for this effort was to bring “the Internet to programs”. The Web, however, is messy. One problem is that “different sites have different names for the same thing.” TAP wanted to develop a system and method for descriptions, not editors, to choreograph
the integration.”
The payoff for this effort, according to Dr. Guha and Mr. McCool is that “good infrastructures have waves of applications.” I think this is a very important point for two reasons:
- The infrastructure makes the semantic functions possible and then the infrastructure supports “waves of applications”.
- The outputs of the system described is new combinations of information, different ways to slice data, and new types of queries, particularly those related to time.
Here’s a screen shot of TAP augmenting a query run on Google.
The augmented results appear to the left of the results list. These are sometimes described as “facets” or “assisted navigation hot links”. I find this type of enhance quite useful. I can and do scan result lists. I find overviews of the retrieved information and other information in the system helpful. When well executed, these augmentations are significant time savers.
Keep in mind that when this TAP work up was done, Dr. Guha did not work at Google. Mr. McCool was employed at Stanford. Yet the demo platform was Google. I find this interesting as well that the presentation emphasizes this point: “We need [an] infrastructure layer for semantics.”
Let me conclude with three questions:
- Google was not directly mentioned as participating in this project, yet the augmented results were implemented using Google’s plumbing. Why is this?
- The notion of fueling waves of applications seems somewhat descriptive of Google’s current approach to enhancing its system. Are semantic functions one enabler of Google’s newer applications?
- When will Google implement these enhanced features of its interface? As recently as yesterday, the Cuil.com interface was described as more up to date than Google. Google had functionality in 2002 or shortly thereafter that moves beyond what Cuil.com showed today.
Let me close with a final question. What’s Google waiting for?
Stephen Arnold, July 31, 2008
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3 Responses to “Stanford TAP: Google Cool that Trails Cuil”
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hmm.. thank you very much. usefull information
Super. It took almost a day to find this info. Thanks, great job. 🙂
Janet 24,
If you work at Google, you have the working Guha system available to you.
Stephen Arnold