Search Engines of the Future

Yet for the imaginary and wished-for perfect search, Battelle says that even tags and clickstreams and the computer learning your preferences won't be enough. He says we need an “intelligent” or “semantic Web,” which is what World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee called it. The intelligent/semantic Web would be able to use reason or, more precisely, logic. Battelle gives a simple example of what that means from a 2002 essay by Paul Ford. If Jim has a friend named Paul, then Paul has a friend named Jim. The intelligent Web would be able to find the statement “Jim is a friend of Paul's” and then, if you did a search for “Paul's friends,” the search engine would be able to return Jim's name, even if it didn't appear in Paul's Web site. The search engine would have made a logical leap.

The semantic/intelligent Web is the model for IBM's WebFountain. It is, as Battelle describes it, a platform used by corporate clients that allows for very specific and detailed queries (and requires the knowledge of how to ask them). It can, for instance, answer a query such as, “Give me all the documents on the Web that have at least one page of content in Arabic, are located in the Midwest, and are connected to at least two similar documents but are not connected to the official Al Jazeera Web site, and mention anyone on a specific list of terrorist suspects.” WebFountain accomplishes this by crawling and indexing the Web (like any search engine does, but it can crawl the entire Web in one day instead of in a month) and then classifies and retags the entire Web as needed by a specific customer, using semantic categories.

For the present, it looks as though the future of search engines is everywhere—in all languages, on all media. The job listings that the big engine/portals like Yahoo! and Google post show you a bit about where search is going. They have posted jobs for people to develop 3-D software, to design better interfaces for mobile devices, to work with video and film technology, and to identify marketing trends that shape user behavior when watching television. These include, but are not limited to, the intersection of Internet and television technologies, video-on-demand services, personal video recorders, and the emergence of next generation set-top boxes with IP connectivity