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What Shape Will it Take Tomorrow?
Continued from page: 1
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Yahoo recently announced an expansion to the BOSS technology called “vertical
lens”. This allows developers build their own vertical search engines using
Yahoo's search technology, through BOSS. It gives developers the ability to
re-rank and control the presentation of search results, besides giving them the
freedom to incorporate the search results database within their own custom-built
search environments.
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| Yahoo Glue fetches confederated
results from all possible aspects of search and presents them in a visually
enhanced manner. |
Beyond text-based search
We have been bound to type words for a search. Though new paradigms are coming
up in the search domain, which will not bound a user to text based search, the
system will be able to comprehend the query based on voice or image. Not only
voice, a user could be able to transmit an audio stream or pass an image to get
results about them. Transmitting an audio stream will be like a feature called
TrackID, that's available with Sony Ericsson mobile phones, whereby a song's
snippet is transmitted to a server to fetch back information about the song.
Working around the same concept, if a user says a few words from Lenin's speech,
he would be able to listen to the whole speech as result.
The image based search is already present with most of the search engines,
but is based on tags associated with the image and thus leading to inappropriate
results at times. Development work is underway to incorporate facial recognition
as a method for image search. For example when you try to find a watch that is
similar to the one you have a digital photo of, the result can lead to
information about the watch details and where a user can buy it from.
Speech Recognition and mobile search
Speech recognition technology is a milestone towards making man-machine
interaction more natural.
It offers maximum benefit for Internet search engines when it comes to users
of mobile devices. And the technology is soon going to make its entry in to
commercial products. Both Microsoft and Yahoo already offer voice services for
mobile phones. The 'Tell me' service of Microsoft offers information categories
like maps, direction and movies and Yahoo's 'One Search' also works on the same
voice recognition technology. iPhone search capability is not the only voice
offering from Google; the directory information service from Google announced
few months back has become a full fledged product. The service allows users to
ask for business phone and address information. As experts foresee, speech
recognition could be the next big thing in mobile search as it saves time. Also
the mobile phones will make the search more accessible. Not only mobile phones,
but even hand-held devices or devices in cars can be used to access search from
voice commands to get information about a location or similar stuff.
| Localizing search
like never before |
We talked to Prasad Ram, R&D Head,
Google India to explore Google India's research on plans of integrating
voice responses, 'desi' search suggestions and more as part of their
upcoming search offerings for Indian users.
 |
Google's philosophy of 'browser is the client' and not just an
application to search the Internet has resulted in a lot of ideas
specifically targeted which will mold into specific product offerings to be
made available to Net users here. These include tools like Map Maker, which
allow users to 'mark' places on extremely localized maps, which can be
shared with the entire community of users. This is aimed at tackling an
issue exclusive to the Indian context that locations are highly populated
and each area has certain specialties that can never be determined and put
down for use on the Internet. Add to this the fact that Indian users trust
their community more in comparison to an electronic resource; Map Maker
hopes to be a popular resource in the weeks to come.
Keeping Indian audiences in mind, Google has formulated certain products
that hope to overcome the most obvious problems that are exclusive to the
area. These include the issue of 'Indian English' where words are spelt
differently from universal nomenclature to yield meanings differently. A
subset of this problem is Indian proper names that tend to have multiple
spelling options in English. Various spelling suggestions which can be
arrived upon by an 'intelligent' search technology, is currently being
developed by Google in India. In addition to this, a 'stemming' application
is also being created which tries to intelligently derive what you 'might
be' looking out based on current usage trends and popular keyword
combinations are also being integrated with this.
To round things off, Google is actively planning to integrate voice into
its core Indian search applications. Currently in pilot stages in Delhi and
Hyderabad, the tool will allow the user to 'speak' the query, which will in
turn be interpreted by the search database and results will be determined
after understanding the accent and pronunciation of the search query. This
will of course require to be tailored to specific areas, even states and
cities. Hand in hand with SMS search and integration with local languages,
Google hopes voice search of this nature could find takers, especially
amongst first time users.
Vishnu Anand |
Enterprise search
The practice of identifying specific content across an enterprise by employees
has been there for long. However, it is only recently that it caught attention
with offerings from Google and Microsoft. Prompt decision making, responding to
a customer, or taking a new intiative; all require back up with comprehensive
data. This calls for a necessity to have easy-to-use and robust search engines
on corporate servers. Enterprise search takes search one step ahead as it helps
in spotting specific documents across enterprise in no time. Besides, in
enterprise search, unlike web search is language-based .
Search Appliance
The Search Appliance from Google can search up to 10 million documents using a
single box. It also provides a personalized search experience for end users.
Optimizing search technology for business uses, the search appliance offers
universal search across a slew of sources, such as, intranets, databases,
applications, and content management services. Among the many new features of
Google Appliance, you have Personalized Search, which allows administrators to
adjust search results for different user groups based on department; alerts,
where employees can subscribe to email alerts for topics of their interest; and
Advanced Reporting where you can view and export daily and hourly result sets,
top queries, etc.
Recently Google announced Search Appliance virtual edition for developers.
The free test bed enables you to test your apps and see how it all integrates
into your development environment without paying a single penny. You can
customize the search result page or even extract it for use on any other
website.
Enterprise search in Windows 7
Windows 7 is the successor of Vista to be released in late 2009. Windows 7 is
coming up with many new features for enterprise search. It clubs together the
search features of Windows Vista, SharePoint Server 2007, and many others to
provide users with improved search experience across networked and local data.
Libraries is just another way of accessing documents across different computers,
hard drives or folders in a single view. Libraries can also be created project
wise under which you can organize and search files lying across several
locations. You can search remote document repositories, SharePoint sites etc
from a single interface with Search Federation. Besides, the Search Scope in
Windows 7 enables administrators populate links on the start menu or even in
Windows Explorer. Such links make it easier to access data sources on the
network.
Conclusion
The innovations in the way we search for information is an on-going process, and
in coming years we will see more options. The answers to user queries would be
based on their preferences, and from the best available information media. That
would truly constitute an ideal search engine. Page(s) 1 2
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