The Future of Search? It’s Academic - The Changing Face of Search
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In the earlier days of the internet, most web surfers were happy to find websites with textual content related to their queries. At that time, most of what was available on the internet was in the form of text. Today, while text still makes up the lion’s share of almost any website’s content, users can find a great deal more. Books, scholarly articles and dissertations, television programs and other videos, music, and images are all being digitized and made available online. Since the source material is so varied and so different from traditional text, different techniques are required, and search engines need to be that much better to help users find what they’re looking for.
Modern search engenders other issues. For example, with several major search engines offering personalized search options, privacy concerns arise over how the engines treat individual search histories. And older questions come back forcing researchers to face issues in new ways. These include such matters as how a user can determine whether to trust the information he finds, and how users can ask (and search engines can handle) more complex questions.
Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute is working on an interesting project to deal with one of the privacy issues. The application is designed to act as an adjunct (and possibly substitute) to the personalized search histories that are already being collected by Google and Yahoo and stored on the search engines’ own networks. Users download the program to their own PCs. It lets them maintain and modify personal information, search preferences, and search history, within a search profile. Search engines would then query the profile, which never leaves the user’s PC. Not only would such an add-on keep personal information off the network, but used properly, it could work with multiple search engines. The technology could be ready as soon as the middle of next year.
Next: Asking the Right Questions >>
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