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Google And IBM Team Up Search Technology

Posted by Zonk on from the only-good-can-come-of-this dept.

An Anonymous Reader wrote to mention a Reuters report on the teaming of IBM and Google over Google's Desktop search technology. From the article: "IBM is linking up its OmniFind corporate search system with Google's free desktop search for business to make it easier for users to locate information throughout an organisation that is often locked up in many separate systems ... Google wins IBM's endorsement among corporate technical managers for its desktop search product and IBM gives corporate information workers an already popular entry point into back-office databases through Google's search. Searchable data ranges from e-mail to computer files to blog postings to corporate repositories of data, images, audio or video, Prial said. Much of this is not available using public Web search tools. Typically, it is hard to reach inside a company except by trawling through many different programs."

4 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Niave Question: What does IBM do? by LionKimbro · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In 1988, if you asked me what IBM does, I would say, "They make computers."

    Because, while my mom owned a Compaq, my friend had an IBM at his house.

    Now, it's 2005, and I find myself asking: "Just what exactly does IBM do do?"

    Joel tells me that they make clear plastic telephones. One of my bosses say they provide "business solutions." This post seems to imply that they have something to do with search. Their website is indecypherable to me.

    So, please, if someone could explain to me in plain language: What is IBM, and what does it do?

    I'm aware of what Wikipedia says, but I'm interested in hearing what juicy nuggets local Slashdot readers may have to offer.

    1. Re:Niave Question: What does IBM do? by jiushao · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Well, one thing they do that is particularly interesting here is making money off patented research. The example that might be very relevant is that they have a patent on so-called hub/authority-ranking.

      Hub/authority-ranking was invented about the same time as PageRank by Jon Kleinberg, a very simple overview is that for each search the method will assign hub and authority scores to the found pages. A page gets hub score for linking to authoritive pages, and an authority score is given by getting linked from hubs. This is of course a recursive definition, the results are approximately calculated by some nice matrix trickery. Any pages that don't contain the search terms but get a lot of authority are also included in the set.

      The nice thing about this method is that it deals well with smaller communities and concepts, where a search for Java with PageRank (and thus Google) will go on and on about the programming language the hub/authorities ranking will have a better chance to pick out a separate set of results for the island and present a few hubs and authorities for each at the top of the results. PageRank fails this kind of things horribly since Java the language has such an incredible pagerank. It also does a lot better for sources that might not refer to the terms searched for directly, Google does this to a very small extent by adding the link text to the set of terms on a page, but the hubs/authorities method gets way better results.

      The downside is that the matrix calculation has to be done for each search with hub/authorities whereas Google precalculates PageRank for all pages every few months.

      So, this sure seems like a somewhat relevant nugget of information here :)

  2. Google Search Appliances start at $3000... by nuclearmoose · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The mini has been very successful for many small-to-medium size business: Google Mini
    And while the 1001 @ $30K is a bit more expensive, it has 5x the doc count, it has many more features... database crawl, feeds, multiple collections, secure doc crawl,etc.

  3. Re:Search as dialog by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    people cannot possibly get any lazier. say you are looking for apple the fruit, then just fucking type "fruit apple" and if it doesn't get you anywhere, just try a few more keyword combinations. that isn't hard.

    google is already too easy. we could've stopped at yahoo... maybe it would have kept a bit more lusers (now they're called bloggers, same concept) out of teh internet

    go ahead, mod me -1 and make my day