Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Seeking Better Web Searches
Scientific American highlights some of the new approaches to searching that are starting to make an impact on the Google-dominated world. Essentially, the thrust of a new search engine is that it will return more of what you want and less of what you don't, but in order to achieve that it has to understand a vast amount about the real world, to understand what "row" may mean, for example, and it also has to understand about the user - what their interests are, and so on.
Searching is not the only thing that requires support - browsing is an obvious battleground. Whilst the original browser wars were lst to Internet Explorer, the rebel alliance...... (sorry, drifted into a flim genre there), there are still new initiatives (Firefox and so on) which show that new ideas are still welcomed by users. My research here into supporting browsing (pdf) shows that there is still a number of things that we can do and routes that we can take. Intelligence in the interface is needed more than ever.
Scientific American highlights some of the new approaches to searching that are starting to make an impact on the Google-dominated world. Essentially, the thrust of a new search engine is that it will return more of what you want and less of what you don't, but in order to achieve that it has to understand a vast amount about the real world, to understand what "row" may mean, for example, and it also has to understand about the user - what their interests are, and so on.
Searching is not the only thing that requires support - browsing is an obvious battleground. Whilst the original browser wars were lst to Internet Explorer, the rebel alliance...... (sorry, drifted into a flim genre there), there are still new initiatives (Firefox and so on) which show that new ideas are still welcomed by users. My research here into supporting browsing (pdf) shows that there is still a number of things that we can do and routes that we can take. Intelligence in the interface is needed more than ever.
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(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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