Google Licenses Australian Algorithm - What Does it Do?
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It’s all about letting the user find out for himself what is most relevant. The Orion search engine hunts down pages where the content covers a topic that is strongly related to the searched-for keyword or phrase. It returns a section of that page. If it did a really good job, a searcher might find the answer to a question right in that section of text, without having to visit the site itself.
That’s only part of what Orion does, though. It also lists other topics related to the keyword, letting the searcher choose ones that are most relevant. If any particular broad topic is like a tree, related topics are branches off that tree, and Orion can help a searcher find the twig they were looking for – or even get a better picture of the whole forest. The university’s press release about the technology describes it as “offering an expert search without having an expert’s knowledge.”
It then provides an example that many of our readers in the United States should be able to relate to from their elementary school days. “Take a search such as the American Revolution as an example of how the system works. Orion would bring up results with extracts containing this phrase. But it would also give results for American History, George Washington, American Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Boston Tea Party and more. You obtain much more valuable information from every search.”
You can easily see how this kind of search engine would save a lot of time. How many times have you found yourself clicking through to a website to find your answer, not finding it, then clicking back to your search results to find a site more likely to contain your answer (and repeating this process several times)? Rather than going through that process, Orion could give you all the answers you need to a query on one page. And if your answer isn’t right on that page, you still have the option to click through to the site itself. The expanded extracts from the websites should give you a good idea of where to go to get that answer.
It’s not perfect, of course. As already mentioned, it’s not quite ready for prime time yet. And by its very nature, Orion is likely to work better for people looking for information rather than something to buy. Then again, content is supposed to be king online, right? Even if it doesn’t revolutionize web searching, it just might revolutionize homework, as students find the answers to their questions online a lot faster and easier.
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