Varun Jain

CS 312

Group E, Assignment 1

The Next Big Thing

Today the internet market is growing at a speedy rate. The search engines, without a doubt, have become much better than what they were in the second half of the 1990's. But still there is much room for improvement in the area of internet search. There is enthusiasm among investors and researchers. They are concentrating on better indexing techniques, they are exploring new horizons like vertical engines, meaning-based search, intent-driven search, new clustering methods, and much more. The latest search trends can be classified into 3 categories:

UI Enhancements

In this category we have websites like Snap, SearchMash and Live.com. Snap and SearchMash use the latest advancement in browsers and AJAX technology, which makes their interface better for search. Snap allows us to use preview powered search, which dynamically loads screenshot in the right side of the window. It potentially shortens the search time. Snap also allows us to search results with a few key strokes, which is another big usability enhancement. SearchMash, the other in this category, uses the latest search innovations. SearchMash is cutting-edge, but still plain and simple. While doing a typical web search, we can see image, blog, video and Wikipedia results in the right side of the screen. The best innovation of SearchMash is perhaps the "More web results" bar. On the other hand Live’s Image Search offers seamless user experience. The infinite scrollbar functionality fits very well and saves you from the hassle of clicking and waiting. And Scratchpad functionality allows you to pick your favorites and compare them easily. 

Technology Advancements

There are various search engines in this category. To start with there is Hakia. With Hakia we can directly ask questions to the search engine. It introduces an indexing method called Query Detection and Extraction. Among the other new search engines are, Vivisimo and Ask, which provide clustered search, which means fragmenting the results of our query so that we can see related terms and go deeper or broader in their data mining. It helps while we search for topics that we are completely new to. Yahoo Mindset brings us results according to our search purposes. For instance, when we enter "Rolex Watches" in the search box, we may be willing to buy a Rolex Watch or make an encyclopedic research about the company. Yahoo's intent-driven search allows us to specify our intent and get the most relevant results. Another engine called Powerset differs by taking into account stop words (by, after, etc), which typical search engines don’t. Thus with this we are able to make a difference between the searches like "book by children" and "book for children". Image Search has been around for a very long time, but to be frank it's still very primitive. What most image search engines do is just look for text around images and examine the image tags. Riya is the first to introduce advanced face recognition technologies in image search.

Vertical Search

Vertical search is a relatively new discipline in search. Basically, vertical engines look up a very limited subset of the internet - so they are more efficient than generic search engines. Because their search area is not so broad, they can adapt themselves for the specific needs and common points of their area of focus.

MLA Style Citation:
Sokullu, Emre “Search 2.0 - What's Next?" December 13, 2006. 01 February 2007, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/search_20_what_is_next.php