Another Take on Lousy Web Search
August 11, 2011
As society is quickly becoming more mobile phone based, the internet industry workers should shift developments in that direction. That is the assertion of the article, Is Web Search in Need of a Shake-Up?, on Locker Gnome. The article reviews an academic paper of similar name, Search Needs a Shake-Up, by Oren Etzioni.
The high and the low of the paper is that search engines’ techniques have largely not changed in the twenty years the world-wide-web has existed and that is simply not acceptable. Since the invention of the internet (thank you, Al Gore) and web, the devices conducting searches have changed beyond what Gene Roddenberry ever imagined.
Once, web surfers were tied down to desktop computers, but now the majority of web users are accessing the internet via their Smartphones or tablets. Because of the limits (mainly screen size) of such devices, web searches should have evolved to become more user-friendly, moving beyond the algorithms that got it thus far. The article explains,
“A search engine of the future should be more than a trained monkey that knows how to find strings of text — it should be able to intelligently discern the connections between what’s being sought after and pertinent entities — such as people, places, and things — for a more sharply relevant series of results.”
As any good infomercial sales person knows, once a problem is identified, there’d better dad-gum be a solution! Etzioni did not disappoint. He recommends Reverb, an open-source tool developed by his own University of Washington Turing Center, as an important first step for the next generation of search engines.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 11, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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