The Future of Search? It’s Academic - Other University Projects
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Some university search projects have shown so much promise that they found themselves purchased by their commercial counterparts. Over the past two years, Google has purchased at least two projects started at Stanford. One may already be bearing fruit for the search engine giant: personalization search tool Kaltix, a technology Google may be using to power its own personalized search histories.
Stanford professors are working on other search-related projects. Associate professor Andrew Ng and others are working on a project titled “Learning to Make Textual Inferences.” Its home page, located here (http://forum.stanford.edu/research/project.php?id=306), explains that the project is dedicated to using AI techniques to allow an algorithm to make inferences as to whether one English sentence logically follows from another (for example, one can infer from the sentence “Guerrillas killed 400 peasants” that “Guerrillas killed a civilian”). In a similar vein, other algorithms are capable of reading a large amount of text and deriving knowledge from it. For example, from the sentence “ldots heavy water rich in the doubly heavy hydrogen atom called deuterium,” the algorithm can infer that deuterium is a type of atom.
Another Stanford professor founded SearchFox, a privately held company with a take on search that is somewhat reminiscent of Yahoo’s MyWeb 2.0. It offers a search engine toolbar that lets users share favorite links. Those interested in this new model of search can check it out at the SearchFox home page here (http://www.searchfox.com/index.php).
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the World Wide Web Consortium have teamed up to create technology that will allow searchers to combine information in new ways. An MIT graduate student working under the umbrella of this partnership developed an interesting Firefox browser plug-in. Dubbed Piggybank, the tool allows users to combine information from several different sites and browse it all together. The site for the tool uses the example of integrating data from Boston.com, a movie web page and Google Maps. The tool can then show users where coffee shops, movie theaters and restaurants are located in relation to each other – very useful information when planning a date, for example, especially if you’re looking for something a little different that isn’t too out of the way.
This is just a sampling of the number and kind of search-related research projects brewing at the major universities. The internet and search engines changed the way we look for, use, and think about information. Those changes are likely to continue for the foreseeable future as research continues, with the goal of presenting information in forms that are more and more useful to the searchers.
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