The invention machine

Googling for questions as well as answers

WORDS in, links out. Why are search engines so dumb? What most people want are answers—not long lists of documents, only some of which are relevant. There must be a better way.

Search engines work by dispatching hordes of robotic spiders to crawl the web and index the keywords on every page they encounter. Type in a simple query and they will parse the words for nouns, adjectives and participles, and return a list of references containing the keywords the spiders have brought back from the web. The only significant difference between Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live is in the statistical rankings they use.

On May 28th Microsoft announced its latest thinking about searching the web at a conference in San Diego. Technically, there is nothing much wrong with its five-year-old search engine. Unfortunately Live does not do anything spectacularly better than Google. And where “googling” has become synonymous with searching the web, Live has languished a distant third in the search stakes with only 8% of the American market compared with Google’s 64% and Yahoo’s 20%.

In a bid to distinguish itself, Microsoft’s new search engine (it was code-named Kumo, but debuted formally as Bing) organises its results in terms of relevant groups rather than a series of links. That way, it hopes to anticipate a person’s actual interests. Thus, a search for “cheap air fares to London” would also return hotels, restaurants, shops and theatre tickets in broadly the same price bracket. People can refine their queries using a table of contents with multiple options.

Underneath the bonnet, Bing is believed to use semantic technology from a search firm in San Francisco called Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft last year. Semantic search engines like Powerset or Hakia of New York look at the meaning of the phrase being searched, and try also to distinguish between words with the same spellings (such as the bark of a tree versus the bark of a dog) by taking their context into account. That alone cuts out a lot of stupid answers.

Read more . . .

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Tags: Google, google yahoo, hakia, Innovation, list of references, search engines work, searching the web, semantic search, statistical rankings

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Economist, Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.