As
mentioned in class last Monday, the four basic functionalities of
search engines are Crawling, Indexing, Ranking and Display. Out of
those four, the latter was pointed out to be “on the verge of a big
change”. With this in mind, we decided that it would be interesting
to discuss on the future of this side of search machines and more
generally on how search machines are expected to change in the next
years.
Beginning
with the display and the interface design, the old-fashioned format
of a list of pages, seems to be one of the
first aspects that search engine companies try to alter. What is
wanted instead of a linear list of independent guesses to the
user's question, is something that looks more like a complete answer;
something that could possibly combine all different kinds of rich
media such as video and audio into the most suitable form for the
specific query. Of course, the main challenge is that each kind of
query has a different structure and a different set of attributes,
resulting in a different most suitable display format.
A
relevant area where researchers focus, is natural-language
searching. What is wanted here is that you should be able to talk to
a search engine in your voice without having to break everything down
into keywords. It is true that alternative mining methods other than
using the “incredibly limiting” ([2]) keyword
search box, do exist but there is a need ([3]) for a search engine
that combine all these existing search
technologies.
But
it is not only the Display that will change in future. As Google's VP
of Engineering for the EMEA, N.Mattos points out ([1]): “one of the
big trends is around getting the internet to be more local and
getting it to be more personalized”. This connects to the Ranking
functionality of search engines and introduces a “social aspect of
ranking”, that influences the search results. Searching in the
future will take advantage of the underlying user's social graph by
imposing it into an algorithmic analysis, in order to make search
more efficient and more relevant and to
further refine a query or disambiguate. Of
course, efforts in this direction are already being made; according
to N. Mattos “Google+” is to Google a social network that “is
going to create the social graph for us”.
The
catalogue of “wants” that could be addressed to search machines
is not limited by any means to the aforementioned ones. There are
lots of other interesting aspects which we cannot include all here.
We choose to conclude this short post with the words of N. Mattos on
what are the three major areas of investments for Google at this
time: “[...]we not only invest in the volume but also we invest in
the diversity and how we can handle different types of documents. But
we also invest in speed because, at the end of the day,[...]they
still want to see those search results in a fraction of a second”.
[1]http://memeburn.com/2011/12/the-future-of-search-is-social-qa-with-googles-nelson-mattos/
[2]http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7358/full/476025a.html
[3]http://nicholasscalice.com/2010/10/02/the-future-of-search-engines/
[4]http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/future-of-search.html
No comments:
Post a Comment