Search Like Star Trek: The Next Frontier
February 28, 2017
I enjoy the “next frontier”-type article about search and retrieval. Consider “The Next Frontier of Internet and Search,” a write up in the estimable “real” journalism site Huffington Post. As I read the article, I heard “Scotty, give me more power.” I thought I heard 20 somethings shouting, “Aye, aye, captain.”
The write up told me, “Search is an ev3ryday part of our lives.” Yeah, maybe in some demographics and geo-political areas. In others, search is associated with finding food and water. But I get the idea. The author, Gianpiero Lotito of FacilityLive is talking about people with computing devices, an interest in information like finding a pizza, and the wherewithal to pay the fees for zip zip connectivity.
And the future? I learned:
he future of search appears to be in the algorithms behind the technology.
I understand algorithms applied to search and content processing. Since humans are expensive beasties, numerical recipes are definitely the go to way to perform many tasks. For indexing, humans fact checking, curating, and indexing textual information. The math does not work the way some expect when algorithms are applied to images and other rich media. Hey, sorry about that false drop in the face recognition program used by Interpol.
I loved this explanation of keyword search:
The difference among the search types is that: the keyword search only picks out the words that it thinks are relevant; the natural language search is closer to how the human brain processes information; the human language search that we practice is the exact matching between questions and answers as it happens in interactions between human beings.
This is as fascinating as the fake information about Boolean being a probabilistic method. What happened to string matching and good old truncation? The truism about people asking questions is intriguing as well. I wonder how many mobile users ask questions like, “Do manifolds apply to information spaces?” or “What is the chemistry allowing multi-layer ion deposition to take place?”
Yeah, right.
The write up drags in the Internet of Things. Talk to one’s Alexa or one’s thermostat via Google Home. That’s sort of natural language; for example, Alexa, play Elvis.
Here’s the paragraph I highlighted in NLP crazy red:
Ultimately, what the future holds is unknown, as the amount of time that we spend online increases, and technology becomes an innate part of our lives. It is expected that the desktop versions of search engines that we have become accustomed to will start to copy their mobile counterparts by embracing new methods and techniques like the human language search approach, thus providing accurate results. Fortunately these shifts are already being witnessed within the business sphere, and we can expect to see them being offered to the rest of society within a number of years, if not sooner.
Okay. No one knows the future. But we do know the past. There is little indication that mobile search will “copy” desktop search. Desktop search is a bit like digging in an archeological pit on Cyprus: Fun, particularly for the students and maybe a professor or two. For the locals, there often is a different perception of the diggers.
There are shifts in “the business sphere.” Those shifts are toward monopolistic, choice limited solutions. Users of these search systems are unaware of content filtering and lack the training to work around the advertising centric systems.
I will just sit here in Harrod’s Creek and let the future arrive courtesy of a company like FacilityLive, an outfit engaged in changing Internet searching so I can find exactly what I need. Yeah, right.
Stephen E Arnold, February 28, 2017
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