One search enhancement technology that has been attracting interest recently is query reprocessing. This approach, implemented by sites such as Hakia and Powerset (recently purchased by Microsoft), attempts to subject search queries to logical analysis in order to better determine the intentions of the searcher.
Hakia, which describes itself as a semantic search engine, claims that this leads to significant improvements over Google. Where Google tends to return the most popular results, Hakia says that its concept matching technology improves the quality of the results, reducing both wasted search time and the use of misleading information. According to Hakia, popularity and quality are not the same thing: the quality of a search result is determined by the credibility of the source, the newness of the material and its relevance to the query. Hakia have implemented a number of specific enhancements that they claim lead to improvements in these areas, including:
Categorization This is the subdivision and display of short - often single-word - queries in categorized form to help the searcher distinguish between various interpretations of the search.
Parallelism This feature enables certain terms in the search query to be dynamically replaced with others that have the same meaning in order to expand the result set. Hakia provide the example of "cure" replacing "treat" in a health query to enable a more representative set of results to be obtained.
Generalization A typical search engine query contains general terms that if treated literally artificially limit the result set. Hakia's generalization function will show results, for example, that contain the names of specific car manufacturers in response to a query that contains the word "car."
Hakia have also made improvements to the way their search results are presented in order to make it easier for users to identify relevant material. These include the use of highlighting, the display of extended text extracts, and a so-called dialog mode in which Hakia will address you directly to point out good answers. This ties in with Hakia's philosophy that in the longer term, search technology must fully embrace user interaction. According to this view, search will only reach fulfillment when it fully supports something approaching natural language queries and extended conversations between the searcher and the search engine. "Eventually," says the Hakia web site, "people would love to talk back and forth to a search engine pretending to be Mr. Spock."
Data typing is another area in which enhancements have been applied to search models to improve the user experience. Google itself has taken certain steps towards evolving from its firmly text-based roots to embrace media such as music and video. However, the seamless integration of different media into a single search remains a distant dream for traditional search engines whose main search interfaces tend to deal strictly in words. Searchmash is one site that has set out to overturn this convention. A Searchmash search for, say, Coldplay, will reveal text results in the main window with image, blog, video and Wikipedia results below drop down menus in a block on the right hand side of the screen.
Ask.com offer an essentially similar presentation, though offering music tracks instead of video. This categorization is brilliantly useful, especially to younger and newer users for whom the web is inherently a rich-media experience. It can help eliminate extensive searching through text results to work out whether they contain the images or videos you're really after, saving time and enhancing the end-user experience.
Better still, Searchmash allows you to play videos from its own site just by clicking its thumbnail, while Ask allows you to do the same with music tracks. As rich media increasingly dominates the web, this kind of integration can only suit users' needs better than traditional text-based searches.
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