Searching for a Revolution
December 16, 2006 · by Scott Fradkin
I ran across a link to an article on Slashdot [Slashdot] that purports to be a list of search engine evolutions for 2007. What it amounts to is a press release by a company called Hakia trying to garner interest in their search engine product. The press release dredges up all kinds of search buzzwords such as “semantic analysis” and “fuzzy logic”. It is a beta product, but even so, if you take a look at the Slashdot comments, others have written that this company really doesn’t do a good job returning relevant results. I’m sure Hakia would add, “yet” to the end of that sentence.
This does bring up an interesting subject, though. What would make a search engine better? And, would it actually make any difference? Has Google done such a good job pulling all of us in that we won’t look elsewhere for our Interweb searching needs?
Google has some amazing resources at their disposal. They hire the best and brightest programmers, many of which are Phds that know academic programming. They have an extremely agile programming process in place. They seem to have endless money to throw around. Are they in it for the long haul? I have to believe so. I just can’t believe that they’re sitting back on their laurels and not trying to advance the state of searching.
Certainly, even as good as Google is most of the time, their searches could be better. Hakia is definitely on to something. Searching needs to branch away from using keywords and meta tags and try to make some sense out of page content in order to categorize it correctly. Being able to write your searches in the form of a real question is also a good move. I know that’s been tried before, but I think the problem is that it’s hard to pull out the real meaning of the question and apply it to a search when you’re searching with keywords.
One of these days, some company or individual will figure it out. How to parse page content and index it in such a way as to allow people to search with more than just keywords so that we can have a better search experience and retrieve better results.
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