A Time mag article on trends in search engines

[Subbarao Kambhampati <rao@asu.edu>]

Makes an interesting read and summarizes several of the new problems
being considered

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1098955,00.html

Sunday, Aug. 28, 2005
On the Frontier of Search
Get ready for a wave of new features--from 3-D satellite pics of your
house to news tailored to your "clickstream." A guide to
innovative engines
By BY TERRY MCCARTHY 

You land late in the evening in a city where you know nobody. You did
not have time to book a hotel, your luggage has not turned up on the
carousel--and the plane's air conditioning gave you a sore throat. What
to do?

With your cell phone, you first Google your suitcase--it has a small
implanted chip that responds to radio waves with a GPS locator--and it
turns out that your luggage has been deposited 200 yds. away in the next
terminal. As you walk over, you search for a hotel room; the screen of
your cell shows you pictures of several hotels in your price bracket,
with views from individual room windows. Your search engine gives you a
list of pharmacies that are still open at this hour, and tells you that
your favorite blues band will be playing at a festival in the city's park
over the weekend. The engine can search your desktop back home, and it
reminds you that a college friend e-mailed you a year ago to say he and
his wife were moving to this city (you had forgotten). You decide to
invite them to the festival.

What you have just tasted is the future of search. It will change the way
humans interface with computers and make today's methods seem as outmoded
as telex machines and brick-size mobile phones. "Search will
ultimately be as good as having 1,000 human experts who know your tastes
scanning billions of documents within a split second," says Gary
Flake, one of just seven Distinguished Engineers at Microsoft, who are
paid to think big thoughts. "It will model the human
brain."

To be sure, you can already access an estimated 10 billion pages of
online text--thanks to Google, Yahoo!, MSN and other search engines.
Americans conducted more than 4.8 billion searches in July--a 22%
increase over July of last year, according to a study by comScore Media
Metrix. But who needs 14,120,000 results in response to a simple
question? People don't want a list--they want an answer.

So the battle is on for the next generation of search, which will be
smarter and more tailored to the individual, embrace video and music--and
be accessible from any device with a chip. By 2010, search-engine
advertising will be a $22 billion industry worldwide, up from an
estimated $8 billion today, according to Safa Rashtchy, a senior analyst
with Piper Jaffray in San Francisco. It's the reason search has become
the most hotly contested field in the world of technology.

While Google is still the forerunner in search, with 36.5% of the
queries, Yahoo! is a strong runner-up, with 30.5%, and MSN stands at
15.5%, according to comScore Media Metrix. In mid-August, Google
announced that it plans to raise an additional $4 billion to fund its
next round of growth. The Big Three are investing aggressively in search
technology, and with their deep pockets, they are likely to remain the
innovation and market-share leaders for some time to come. But a crop of
new start-ups, mostly clustered in Silicon Valley and Seattle, offer a
glimpse of the next frontier of search, where imagination has no
limits.

PICTURE AND VIDEO Now that still and moving images are increasingly
digitized, they too can be searched with a click. Singingfish, acquired
by America Online (which is owned by Time Warner, TIME's parent company)
two years ago, can search AOL's video library of 15,000 titles, plus
millions more over the Web, by looking for their titles and other
attached identifying text, known as their metadata.

A more futuristic image search, which can scan and recognize facial
images, is being developed by Massachusetts-based Viisage. It focuses on
unique marks on the human face--cheekbones, tip of the nose--and can
cross-reference pictures with databases, much to the interest of
law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. In Florida, the Pinellas
County sheriff's office has outfitted troopers' cars with a system that
uses Viisage technology. If a trooper sees someone acting suspiciously,
the officer can take a digital image of the person, upload it to a
database of criminals, and get back any hits. How hard is it for bad guys
to game the system with a beard, a baseball cap or colored contact
lenses? Mohamed Lazzouni, the company's chief technology officer, says
they would have to change their bone structure to spoof the
technology.

CELL PHONES Mobile search is mostly done today with limited text
messaging, but by 2008, when more than 75% of new cell phones globally
are expected to be Internet-ready, searching the Web on the go will be
standard. On the street, and want to find out the nearest movie theater?
Or get sports results? Pankaj Shah's mobile service 4INFO, which the
32-year-old launched this February in Palo Alto, Calif., will give you
all the information--for free--by text or Internet on your cell phone.
Yahoo! also offers such local information.

Want to know more about what you see in front of you? Boston-based Mobot
has developed technology that maps the features in a picture taken with a
cell-phone camera and matches it to a database of images. "Within a
decade, it will be inconceivable that you lived in a world where you
couldn't interact with the objects around you--taking a picture and
getting back information about it or making a purchase--using a mobile
device," says Mobot marketing vice-president Lauren Bigelow. Yahoo!
has 61% of the mobile Web market with 15 products, including search, and
has developed a technique that simplifies Web pages for small mobile
screens.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Search engines are good at matching words across
websites but have struggled with nuance to answer questions in everyday
language. Google today can answer basic factual queries. The next step is
semantic search--looking for meaning, not just matching key words. Oren
Etzioni, a University of Washington computer scientist, uses
language-analysis programs to power KnowItAll, which scans documents for
facts--Oswald killed J.F.K., for example. So far, KnowItAll has extracted
900 million facts--enabling it to answer questions. Nosa Omoigui, 33, a
former Microsoft researcher, founded Bellevue-based Nervana, which
analyzes language by linking word patterns contextually to answer
questions in defined subject areas, such as medical-research
literature.

USER-GENERATED One of the fastest-growing search techniques is tagging, a
grassroots phenomenon whereby users label websites with descriptive tags,
building a network of knowledge dubbed folksonomy--a taxonomy of
knowledge organized by ordinary folk. Yahoo! was quick to spot this
trend, and in March bought Flickr, a photo website organized with a
communal tagging model. Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo!'s technology director,
says the company wants to apply search across all its user-created
content. The tagline? "Better search through people."

AUDIO Exactly when in the movie did Clark Gable say, "Frankly, my
dear, I don't give a damn"? Blinkx.TV can track down that video clip
in a matter of seconds. Speech-recognition technology is improving so
rapidly that the company founded by 27-year-old Suranga Chandratillake
can capture the audio tracks of videos and turn them into searchable
text--making any recorded spoken words immediately searchable.

Atlanta-based Nexidia has developed technology that can phonetically map
human speech, and it may ultimately recognize individual voices. So far,
Nexidia is selling its system to government intelligence agencies and
telephone customer-service centers. Outsourcing companies with call
centers can use the software to search for phrases such as "Can you
repeat that?" and "I don't understand you," then listen to
the entire call to troubleshoot. Much of the company's work is
classified, but Nexidia says its Arabic language model is in wide use
today in Iraq. Helping compensate for the shortage of Arabic linguists in
the U.S. intelligence community, Nexidia's technology can
"listen" to audio and alert linguists to phrases that are of
concern.

SATELLITE Online maps are widely available but now, because pictures are
easier to understand than maps, satellites are changing the game. Since
buying Keyhole last fall, Google has launched Google Earth, which offers
searchable satellite views of the planet.
A9.com Amazon's search subsidiary, sent
trucks around 22 U.S. cities with digital cameras linked to laptops to
photograph every street. So far it has 35 million pictures, which will be
overlaid on maps. Microsoft is combining the approaches from the air--its
Virtual Earth project is flying planes over cities to take pictures. The
aim is to have views from all directions so users can circle buildings
onscreen--a bit like being in a video game. "This is going to a
fully immersive virtual-reality experience," says Erik Jorgensen,
general manager of MSN Local Search and MapPoint.

PERSONALIZED One of the hottest and most controversial new areas is
designing software that will get to know individuals' interests, mostly
through their search history--the clickstream. Findory, a Seattle-based
news-search site launched in January 2004, provides access to news
stories and blogs. As you start searching for certain types of stories,
the site gradually learns about your preferences, and the home page
evolves to mirror your interests. Google includes a similar feature in
its most recent desktop search tool, called Sidebar, which was released
last week. The technology makes some consumers uneasy: How much do you
want your computer to know about you?

It may be too late to worry about that. Search has already changed our
lives. After all, who you are on a Google or Yahoo! search pretty much
defines who you are these days. Search is "forcing us to reconsider
what it means to be a public person," says John Battelle, co-founder
of Wired and author of The Search, due out in September. "Search is
everything and will be everywhere." Coming soon to a chip near you.
--With reporting by Amanda Bower, Laura Locke/San Francisco

Copyright © 2005 Time Inc. All rights reserved.