A Look at the Future of Web Search
The February issue of Scientific American is out and contains a lengthy article about web search and info retrieval.
You can read the six page article titled: Seeking Better Web Searches online.
For many of you the article will be a review of several web search tools and projects that you likely already know about and for others it will be a good intro.
You’ll read about:
+ Personalization of results
+ Using “wrappers” to access deep or Invisible Web mateial.
+ Clustering
+ Contextual and location-aware searching
+ 3D Search
+ Music search
Search tools mentioned include:
+ Clusty
+ Mooter
Wow, that’s a name we haven’t heard in many months.
+ Kartoo
Visualization and metasearch.
+ + The article says that Microsoft’s Longhorn release will offer a desktop search tool similar to Google’s. Interesting, its been known for many months that MS would release a desktop search application prior to releasing Longhorn. As you know, a beta was released last month.
+ “Recently Amazon, Ask Jeeves and Google announced initiatives that attempt to improve search results by allowing users to personalize their searches.”
Hey, Yahoo also has a similar service. Of course, tools like Findory also are working in the pesonalization space.
+ PowerScout (unreleased) from Microsoft and Watson.
“PowerScout and Watson are the first systems introduced capable of integrating searches with user-interest profiles generated from indirect sources.”
+ Rover, a research project at the University of Maryland
Location-awareness search. “…a system that makes use of text, audio or video services across a wide geographic area. Rover can present maps of the region in a user’s vicinity that highlight appropriate points of interest.”
+ Princeton’s Shape Retrieval and Analysis Group’s 3-D Model Search Engine
+ Meldex
A music search engine from the New Zealand Digital Library Project