The Future of Search Engines
Pranam Kolari, 12:54am 1 February 2005Via Richard Waters from Financial Times – In Search of More: The ‘friendly’ engines that will manage the data of daily life. Richard discusses possible search engine directions in quite a length.
May 2008. Google launches G-Life … November 2008. Yahoo!’s new MobileBuddy .. January 2010. 10 years after America Online bought Time Warner, Google acquires Walt Disney.
Most of the content is hypothetical, but is fairly obvious and trivially predictable. Interesting to note was the point on the need of meta-data to augment current search technologies – something which is being talked about and used(Technorati) quite regularly now.
The internet has also introduced an important new layer of context. Led by Google, web search engines interpret the meaning of information based on the meta-data attached to web pages, as well as analysing the links between web pages to assess its relevance.
Meta-data promises to bring other forms of visual content within reach of the search engines. Some digital cameras already encode information on a picture, such as the time it was taken. Global positioning sensors built into camera phones could add location information. Using the voice capabilities of a camera phone, the user could also append commentary when taking a snapshot, then use keywords to search for the picture later, says Adam Sohn, marketing director of Microsoft’s MSN unit.
Ultimately, all the random, unstructured information contained on web pages and other data-repositories could be subjected to a form of structuring that made it more intelligible to machines. This is the idea behind the Semantic Web, a vision of the future internet promoted by Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web.
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