What Shape Will it Take Tomorrow?

Internet search has undergone a complete makeover with many applications offering you search options. With new paradigms like semantic web, search engines now offer you more relevant and personalized information.

Thursday, January 01, 2009

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Over the last decade Internet has proven to be a vast sea of information and we keep on looking for tiny drops of information that answers our queries. Search engines have now become an integral part of our lives. Out of those, Google search engine has become so common and popular that it has become a synonym for search. Be it a student, researcher, professional or any other person looking for information on the web, and he is bound to look at some search engine or the other to begin their quest, and in most cases the search engine will have to be Google.

We too had an unsolved question lurking in our minds, so we googled up to find its answer. My query was, “What was the name of the school that Mahatma Gandhi attended?”, and the 10 links that came up on the results page gave vague information leading me nowhere. A few links referred to a school or university named after Mahatma Gandhi, while some other led to Wiki pages where I had to search the content to seek an answer to my query. The same query when run on other search engines too didn't lead to any straight answer. The result is just a guess that might be relevant or not as an answer to the query, as it is based on keywords that are part of the query, which could have a direct answer. But for response, I had to browse through various links. This has been the limitation of search engines till this point; they provide guesses rather than the exact answer to a user's query. And this is an area where things are changing rapidly, with top search-engines vying to make users' search easier, faster and more accurate.

If you compare the present search results to what you were five years back, you will notice a lot has changed in terms of presentations and also relevance. With the advent of Web 2.0, search is undergoing tremendous changes with the influence of local, personalized and universal search. Even mobile search has emerged as a new trend. Let's look at some of the areas where innovations are happening in Internet search and what we can expect the search to be like in coming years. This will show us what an ideal search engine could look like.

Knowing user intentions
The starting point for innovating in the search engine begins with understanding the 'intent' with which a user approaches a search portal. There are a considerable number of users who use a search engine for 'domain navigation; in other words, to get to a site they have in mind. But a bigger chunk of users are in one way or the other 'looking for answers' to a particular query. And there is a limit to which technology can go in understanding the 'intent' of the user. He is obviously not expected to be taught how to search, and thus the search engine should be 'intelligent' enough to understand what the user might be looking for. Top search engines are now trying to have the ability to know a searcher's intent by knowing the mode he is in. As a searcher can be looking to buy, to research or just be entertained, each of these different modes can lead to a totally different result for the same search. Microsoft with their Live Search and Google are focusing on knowing what mode users are in when they are using search, so that they can be provided with the best results possible.

Apart from the mode that users are in, the search service providers are trying to incorporate algorithms and AI techniques that help them determine the intent of the query more accurately, despite common problems such as spelling errors, punctuations and common words ( like 'is', 'are' that are mostly neglected from the search phrase). Thus not just emphasizing on the keywords, but also trying to evaluate the meaning of the search query. Hakia (www.hakia.com) is one such search engine that uses QDEX (Query Detection and Extraction) indexing model, which does a deep semantic analysis of the pages it crawls. It not only matches the keywords from the search query, but also formulates the meaning of the query to match with the pages' content to produce a relevant result. Knowing the intent of the searcher is what can lead to provide more personalized search results to the user; Yahoo-Mindset search is based on being intent-driven.

Personalized search
Evaluating the intent from the searcher's query is one aspect, but what if the search engine knows about the manner in which a user search for information can lead to more accurate and relevant results. This is where all top search engines are focusing upon. The search engines will keep track of your search trends, your browsing preferences and also about your location. Of course, all this personal information will be taken with the permission of the user. Google Personalized search determines the location of the user from the IP address where the query was generated and thus returns results that are from the user's region.

The results on Google are personalized. It also provides options to promote or remove a result from the list and to add comments to results.

Based on the search queries that a user had used earlier, search engines will be able to determine the context in which search keywords are to be used. Suppose, if the query fired is 'LBW', then from previous search behavior of the user, search engines will have the ability to server that intent by producing personalized results of 'Leg Before Wicket' for a cricket enthusiast, while for a medical student it will generate results that provide information on 'Low Birth Weight'.

Localization of search
Since location is relevant in a lot of searches, incorporating user location proves pivotal in increasing the relevance of the search. But the correct meaning of localization won't just be limited to the location of the user, but also in incorporating the language of the user. The web is a vast information resource, and for every query there exists an answer somewhere, but what would be the use if search engines could not produce the result in a language that the user reads. Search engines are now eclipsing this language barrier by investing on machine translation. A concept whereby the results will be produced to the user, translated to a language he speaks and reads. Search service providers like Google and Yahoo are providing an option that lets them to translate a page into their local language. But the auto-translation of the result is what is under research and in coming years we can see true localized search engine results.

A visual search engine determines the similarity of image content through analysis of color, shape and texture.

Collaborating Media
You fire a search query and you get 10 links as result. Browse those links to get the response to your query. Now imagine for the same query you get a result page that not only fetches you 10 links to web pages but also shows some images related to your search, news feeds along with blog reports pertaining to your search query. This is what search engines are already transforming into; collaborating information from various media into one presentation. Google's Universal Search is one such example, which includes images, videos, books, news and map information into the results page. This is a radical change from just getting 10 guesses as result; now a user is presented a rich media which answers the user's query. For example, a query fired about a song, will result in a page that presents the user a video of the song, lyrics of the songs, along with images and information about the artist whose song it is.

Vertical Search
Vertical search refers to a specialized search. Unlike generic search, vertical search engines look up a very limited subset of the wealth of information in the Internet. Such search engines are meant for specialized needs of users. Vertical search engines send their crawlers out to a highly focused database to bring back specific information as desired by a user. Such results are most value to people interested in a specific area. However the companies that advertise on such search engines reach a very refined audience. Hundreds of such vertical search engines have sprung up these days. Retrevo.com is a site that helps you browse and find electronics items. Now there are search engines for virtually everything including job seekers, travel, patients and veterinarians.

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