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Looking for Answers in the Age of Search
prostoalex writes "James Fallows, in a New York Times article, notices that search engines are getting pretty good at providing information for simple keyword-based queries. However, when it comes to the actual information, such as finding the necessary data and statistics, they're not doing a great job. The article talks about the NSA- and CIA-sponsored Aquaint project that aims to deliver answers to questions that might be expressed with a variety of keywords, and need to be 'understood' by the search engine before providing the answer."
No matter which search engine I use, still none of them can help me search for my missing car keys or missing left socks.
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
Ho yes, there's a good idea. Give Google the ability to understand.
Deleted
One thing missed in so many search engines now is finding information on a particular company quickly and efficiently. Often when I type a particular company into google or another search, I get a bunch of other hits before the actual company itself. Now, bigger companies come as the first hit often (i.e., apple, dell, canon, etc.) Try finding for that lesser-known company though and you'll encounter a lot of crap first. The company listing should always come first.
sig here
...is here:
h tml
http://www.ic-arda.org/InfoExploit/aquaint/index.
...like the Semantic Web?
No, I don't know why it's being relaunched. My guess is that it's probably one of the answers that we are looking for in the age of search that didn't quite cut it. But isn't that what all these different meta-searches are talking about? The ability to get semantic meaning imbued into the web?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Google really lacks at filtering out noise. I was looking for Gran Turismo tuning stuff yesterday. Gran Turismo tuning -"release date" -cheats -faq, &c &c &c. The list of restrictions to filter out noise kept getting bigger and bigger, but it was still just the big agencies that were getting hits, nothing about the game itself.
Clusty on the other hand is no sucker for a press release. I find its much smarter at locating actual content.
Myren
Just try to google a website for these guys!
I know where I'd like to see this first: A digital librarian for Wikipedia. An agent that would recommened articles based on your preferences and maybe store the articles in some language neutral format where articles could be expressed into a target language or parsed from a language into neutral format. Too bad nobodies publicly demonstrated anything close to the level of machine intelligence that would be required to do it.
Shh.
I for one would welcome our new search engine overloards, except google already runs my life, so it'd be a bit redundant.
I continue to welcome the mighty all-knowing google as the ruler of our lives.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Than finding 50+ people asking the same question you are, and not a single answer. (or even only one person asking the question, but because the mailing list or newsgroup was being archived on more than one website, you find the same question over and over again).
It's even more annoying when you had the same question a couple of months before, and had found the answer, but can't remember what the answer was, where your found the answer, or what search terms you had used. (and it's even worse if that site has gone down in its rankings, and something else with people asking the question, but no answer, now ranked higher).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
for an 'intelligent' FAQ.
It uses more of a human based system, it 'learns' as folks type in different questions (and versions of the same question)and tell it whether the answers it gives are helpful. As uses 'teach' it, it gets better at providing relevent results to natural language queries.
Worth a look:
http://mindmeld.sourceforge.net/mmsf/index.php
What a surprise. http://www.ai.sri.com/search/
They beep and flash when you whistle.
I know people who whisle and while they flash.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
1. Google needs to find and kill keyword-filled spam/malware/whatever pages. Not just remove them from their search list, but murder the people who started them.
2. Google needs to filter responses based on ad content. If there are a ton of ads, chances are, the site is bupkiss and its priority should be massively downgraded.
3. Google needs to filter based on ownership by holding companies. These cybersquatters should be downgraded in response priority and their pets should be sterlized or neutered to control the pet population.
4. Google needs to get back in the kitchen and make me a pie.
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Fix those things, then perhaps we should worry about statistical analysis... (but hey, thats just me)
IMHO, if you want accurate stats and information, go to a library...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Can you say Dogpile?
Google is the number one search agent for me as more often than not with a short list of carefully chosen starting terms, and a little refinement from sleuthing, I can find what I need pretty quickly.
Do the search engines have to be so smart they find what we meant to find or even what we think we meant to find as opposed to what we literally asked for? They're tools, like library cards, not servants there to do our work for us and stop us from thinking about the search process. Are we complaining because this all isn't as brainless as AOL?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I think that there will always be a need for knowledge specialists (professional researchers), whose job it is to develop useful results from requests for information, using whatever tools are at hand.
Tools like Google and MSN Search are not the only thing you need to find information. There are still places for other information, and 'because Google said so' is not a valid reason for accepting information as relevant, or factual.
Although these tools will continue to improve, the application of wisdom will still require human input to make the results useful.
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
is the ability to filter out certain types of sites. Like the sites that are webinterfaces to Usenet or sites that sell stuff.
When I now look for a digital camera, I get hunderds of sites trying to sell me one, then a lot of sites that talk about it till I get to the makers homepage. an example The page I am looking for is this one
Vivisimo makes it a bit easier, but not completely.
A9 also failed to produce the correct page.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I for one welcome our new CIA/NSA designed search engine overlords (because they will get me otherwise).
Just think; In Soviet Russia the government searches you!
Get your Unix fortune now!
If you run Linux, you have a decent tool-kit on hand to enhance search engine performance. Use lynx from the command line, with either the -source or -dump option, and pipe it through sed and such to filter it however you like. A recursive check of each link from the main page should get you most of the results, but you'd have to alter the formulae depending on which engine you use.
You could even put a Python script somewhere in the pipeline, which could sort the resulting links and keywords into a dictionary data structure, useful to save as a pickled object which can be recalled at leisure. Heck, once you have a source file in text form on your desktop, you have all those text tools to fiddle with. I'm sure others can come up with 100 more ideas.
In point of fact, the only thing requiring me to use search engines at all is the question, given that it would be simple enough to have a bot crawl the web for me while I sleep, of where would I *put* the data? But for small, specific applications, this manner could even work, and it could generate a list of links as bookmarks for you to try in the morning.
On the whole, I prefer that search engines *not* try to read my mind, because too often in the tech age, reading my mind changes to "making my mind up for me". I favor broad results which I can narrow in batch scripts, vs pre-narrowed results that reflect some corporate IDIOT's idea of what I'm supposed to find, but which will inevitably make what I want unobtainable.
I would have to disagree with the poster - significant researching efforts have been put into question answering and factual data retrieval from the web. Visit the University of Massachusetts Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval website. For a more specific project, check out QuASM