Search History: Mostly Forgotten and Definitely of Zero Interest to the Smart Software Crowd
July 10, 2020
There’s an interesting, if selective, write up about online information search and retrieval. Navigate to “The Bourne Collection: Online Search Is Older Than You Think.”
An interesting statement appears in the write up:
Founder Roger Summit had been part of Lockheed Missiles and Space Corporation’s mid-1960s Information Sciences Laboratory (1964). He had built his ideas about iterative search—a “dialog” between the user and the computer—into a separate online search division for Lockheed. (This was very different from the “take your best shot” approach of modern search engines, where you generally need to run a new search to refine irrelevant results). Dialog licensed access to leading databases in a variety of fields, which you could search with its powerful tools. While the overall amount of information was far smaller than on the modern web, it was far, far more relevant and better organized.
For the modern online experts, such a quaint, irrelevant, and inefficient concept.
Stephen E Arnold, July 10, 2020
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One Response to “Search History: Mostly Forgotten and Definitely of Zero Interest to the Smart Software Crowd”
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Hmmm, search is not older than you and I think. and Dialog is still relevant to professional searchers. Earlier this week, the AIIP (Association of Independent Information Professionals) hosted a Dialog rep who told us all about the newest enhancements. Thus, the use of the past tense in this article is unfounded. It’s not “Dialog was”, it’s “Dialog is”.