Newsweek article on searchengines

[Subbarao Kambhampati <rao@asu.edu>]

Continuing our plan to enlist major news organizations to do some of the
teaching for the semester,
here is an excerpt from this week's Newsweek frontstory on
Google:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4571035/ 
(also see the alternatives to Google article
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4571137/ )

Indeed, over the next few years search will evolve in a
number of key areas, and Google faces big competition in all of
them.

DEEP CONTENT. Searching the Web can yield amazing results, but
they're still limited and skewed. "What's on the Web is extremely
ephemeral," says Brewster Kahle. "Very little of it was written
before 1995." Amazon took a giant step to address this with its
Search Inside the Book feature that lets people query a library of
120,000 tomes. Despite the pay-for-content controversy, Yahoo's CAP is an
intriguing attempt to lure content providers not on the public Web to
submit to its indexes. "It might take a decade or two to put all the
world's information into Google and do things with it," says
engineering VP Wayne Rosing. "But it's an achievable
goal."

MULTIMEDIA. Google has an Image Search function with almost a
billion pictures. Microsoft researchers in China are going full blast to
create software that searches through pictures­possibly identifying faces
and locations. Meanwhile, a Washington, D.C., start-up called Streamsage
has created breakthrough technology that searches audio and video
broadcasts by analyzing speech. And AOL, whose search strategy is to
build features on top of Google technology, recently bought an
audio-video search operation called SingingFish.

PERSONALIZATION. A search engine that knows you're a sports-car
buff is more likely to give you auto sites when you query the word
Jaguar. Google here is at a disadvantage compared with places like Yahoo
and Amazon, which know a lot about their customers.

LOCALIZATION. Last week Google introduced its local search, which
produces a map when you type in a category (say "restaurants")
and a ZIP code. But again, Yahoo and MSN have loads of information about
where its users live. The breakthrough here might come in a marriage of
search engines and cell phones.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. "The ultimate goal is to have a
computer that has the kind of semantic knowledge that a reference
librarian has," says Google's director of technology Craig
Silverstein. But truly smart search engines are probably decades
away.


rao