Google Licenses Australian Algorithm - More About the Project
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Licensing the technology to Google, after also being reportedly courted by Yahoo! and MSN, is not a bad return on investment. The project itself was funded by a $150,000 grant from the Australian Research Council. And I have to give them credit; you really need to know how to read the academic language to find the promise in this project.
It was titled “RichProlog, a System for Deducing, Inducing and Learning in the Declarative Programming Paradigm.” And I know I could never work for the ARC now. The project aimed to “contribute to bridge the gap between learning and logic, theoretically and practically,” “extend considerably the scope of the declarative programming paradigm” and “build a system that can be used to solve learning or discovery problems as encountered in Artificial Intelligence.” Only the third statement suggested something related to search engines to me, which probably means I should stick to reporting this stuff rather than trying to write a search engine (or a letter requesting a grant, for that matter).
The return on that $150,000 investment could mean a steady stream of royalty payments the University of New South Wales if Google actually incorporates the technology into its search engine. Some analysts think the Orion technology could indeed become the basis for the next generation of search engines. The idea is that it will improve not only the relevance of the results, but give searchers a better idea as to whether those particular results have the answers they need, thanks to the more detailed sample of each file.
This has certain implications for web publishers, one of which I already mentioned – the likelihood that searchers will have less need to visit the website that has the information they need. When asked about this point in an online interview, Ori Allon gave a thoughtful response. “This is a very good question. I don’t envision that Orion will completely eliminate the need for going to actual web pages but rather expedite the search process. It could also result in the user going to more web pages since they will be alerted to other keywords related to their search.”
Next: What’s in it for Google? >>
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