Government Initiatives and Search: A Make-Work Project or Innovation Driver?
March 25, 2013
I don’t want to pick on government funding of research into search and retrieval. My goodness, pointing out that payoffs from government funded research into information retrieval would bring down the wrath of the Greek gods. Canada, the European Community, the US government, Japan, and dozens of other nation states have poured funds into search.
In the US, a look at the projects underway at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval reveals a wide range of investigations. Three of the projects have National Science Foundation support: Connecting the ephemeral and archival information networks, Transforming long queries, and Mining a million scanned books. These are interesting topics and the activity is paralleled in other agencies and in other countries.
Is fundamental research into search high level busy work. Researchers are busy but the results are not having a significant impact on most users who struggle with modern systems usability, relevance, and accuracy.
In 2007 I read “Meeting of the MINDS: An Information Retrieval Research Agenda.” The report was sponsored by various US government agencies. The points made in the report were, like the University of Massachusetts’ current research run down, were excellent. The 2007 recent influences are timely six years later. The questions about commercial search engines, if anything, are unanswered. The challenges of heterogeneous data also remain. Information analysis and organization which is today associated with analytics and visualization-centric systems could be reprinted with virtually no changes. I cite one example, now 72 months young, for your consideration:
We believe the next generation of IR systems will have to provide specific tools for information transformation and user-information manipulation. Tools for information transformation in real time in response to a query will include, for example, (a) clustering of documents or document passages to identify both an information group and also the document or set of passages that is representative of the group; (b) linking retrieved items in timelines that reflect the precedence or pseudo-causal relations among related items; (c) highlighting the implicit social networks among the entities (individuals) in retrieved material;
and (d) summarizing and arranging the responses in useful rhetorical presentations, such as giving the gist of the “for” vs. the “against” arguments in a set of responses on the question of whether surgery is recommended for very early-stage breast cancer. Tools for information manipulation will include, for example, interfaces that help a person visualize and explore the information that is thematically related to the query. In general, the system will have to support the user both actively, as when the user designates a specific information transformation (e.g., an arrangement of data along a timeline), and also passively, as when the system recognizes that the user is engaged in a particular task (e.g., writing a report on a competing business). The selection of information to retrieve, the organization of results, and how the results are displayed to the user all are part of the new model of relevance.
In Europe, there are similar programs. Examples range from Europa’s sprawling ambitions to Future Internet activities. There is Promise. There are data forums, health competence initiatives, and “impact”. See, for example, Impact. I documented Japan’s activities in the 1990s in my monograph Investing in an Information Infrastructure, which is now out of print. A quick look at Japan’s economic situation and its role in search and retrieval reveals that modest progress has been made.
Stepping back, the larger question is, “What has been the direct benefit of these government initiatives in search and retrieval?”
On one hand, a number of projects and companies have been kept afloat due to the funds injected into them. In-Q-Tel has supported dozens of commercial enterprises, and most of them remain somewhat narrowly focused solution providers. Their work has been suggestive, but none has achieved the breathtaking heights of Facebook or Twitter. (Search is a tiny part of these two firms, of course, but the government funding has not had a comparable winner in my opinion.) The benefit has been employment, publications like the one cited above, and opportunities for researchers to work in a community.,
On the other hand, the fungible benefits have been modest. As the economic situation in the US, Europe, and Japan has worsened, search has not kept pace. The success story is Google, which has used search to sell advertising. I suppose that’s an innovation, but it is not one which is a result of government funding. The Autonomy, Endeca, Fast Search-type of payoff has been surprising. Money has been made by individuals, but the technology has created a number of waves. The Hewlett Packard Autonomy dust up is an example. Endeca is a unit of Oracle and is becoming more of a utility than a technology game changer. Fast Search has largely contracted and has, like Endeca, become a component.
Some observations are warranted.
First, search and retrieval is a subject of intense interest. However, the progress in information retrieval is advancing just slowly in my opinion. I think there are fundamental issues which researchers have not been able to resolve. If anything, search is more complicated today than it was when the Minds Agenda cited above was published. The question is, “Maybe search is more difficult than finding the Higgs Boson?” If so, more funding for search and retrieval investigations is needed. The problem is that the US, Europe, and Japan are operating at a deficit. Priorities must come into play.
Second, the narrow focus of research, while useful, may generate insights which affect the margins of larger information retrieval questions. For example, modern systems can be spoofed. Modern systems generate strong user antipathy more than half the time because they are too hard to use or don’t answer the user’s question. The problem is that the systems output information which is quite likely incorrect or not useful. Search may contribute to poor decisions, not improve decisions. The notion that one is better off using more traditional methods of research is something not discussed by some of the professionals engaged in inventing, studying, or selling search technology.
Third, search has fragmented into a mind boggling number of disciplines and sub-disciplines. Examples range from Coveo (a company which has ingested millions in venture funding and support from the province of Québec) which is sometimes a customer support system and sometimes a search system to Palantir (a recipient of venture funding and US government funding) which outputs charts and graphs, relegating search to a utility function.
Net net: I am not advocating the position that search is unimportant. Information retrieval is very important. One cannot perform some work today unless one can locate a specific digital item in many cases.
The point is that money is being spent, energies invested, and initiatives launched without accountability. When programs go off the rails, these programs need to be redirected or, in some cases, terminated.
What’s going on is that information about search produced in 2007 is as fresh today as it was 72 months ago. That’s not a sign of progress. That’s a sign that very little progress is evident. The government initiatives have benefits in terms of making jobs and funding some start ups. I am not sure that the benefits affect a broader base of people.
With deficit financing the new normal, I think accountability is needed. Do we need some conferences? Do we need giveaways like pens and bags? Do we need academic research projects running without oversight? Do we need to fund initiatives which generate Hollywood type outputs? Do we need more search systems which cannot detect semantically shaped or incorrect outputs?
Time for change is upon us.
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2013
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