Ask.com's Tomasz Imielinski discusses semantic search as Microsoft's Scott Prevost and Google's Peter Norvig look on.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News)SAN JOSE, Calif.--If those chasing Google have anything to say about it, search on the Internet is going to become more about a conversation than an exchange of keywords.
Panelists from the four major search engines--Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com--joined Web search start-ups TrueKnowledge and Hakia at the Semantic Technology Conference to discuss the rise of semantic technology as the engine behind the still nascent Internet search industry. Semantic search, or the idea of divining a user's true intent from how they enter their queries and how Web data is structured, is an unfamiliar concept to the majority of Web surfers who tend to think Internet search is actually pretty good as it is.
It's not, according to Tomasz Imielinski, executive vice president, global search and answers at Ask.com. "Most users don't know how good search can be," he said, drawing an analogy to those who were satisfied with their portable music options until the iPod came along.
The W3C is devoting an entire week to the concept of semantic technology, which involves Web publishers and search engines working together to structure data in a way that can be presented in a more appealing way than the "ten blue links"--a dirty term in the search industry these days--with which most searchers have grown familiar.
Yahoo has been banging this drum for a few years, introducing products like Search Monkey to help Web publishers start organizing their content around semantic standards, said Andrew Tompkins, chief scientist at Yahoo Search. "Today on any major search engine, you'll see structured information about a restaurant," he said, basic things like phone numbers, address, or maybe a link to a map of its location. All of those things require agreement on standards to make it happen.
But semantic search is also about improving the ability of search engines to analyze the meaning of plain text on a page, said Scott Prevost, general manager and director of product at Microsoft's Powerset division. A search engine that knows how to take a query and produce exactly what a person is looking for on the first page of results will prove attractive over time, he said.
The goal of all this work is to make search more intuitive, more like asking a friend or colleague a question, said Riza Berkan, CEO of semantic start-up Hakia. "We believe search is going to move to more conversational techniques," he said.
That's music to Ask.com's ears, of course. The company announced Wednesday that it now has 300 million question and answer pairs in its database that Imielinkski thinks provide context around searches.
But none of this work on semantic technology has done anything to dislodge Google from its position atop the search world, which actually grew a bit stronger over the past month according to ComScore. Google's Peter Norvig acknowledged the benefits of semantic technology and agreed that Yahoo deserves credit for pushing semantic technology along. He drew applause from the several hundred attendees at the panel discussion when he discussed Google's decision to support RDFa semantic standards, announced last month at Searchology.
Still, there's an economic component to this debate that Google isn't quite buying. None of the panelists brought this up Wednesday, but last year Microsoft's Prevost admitted that the desire to make an end-run around Google's dominance of keyword-based search advertising is what has driven semantic technology research, at least to a certain degree. "If people aren't bidding on keywords, and are bidding on concepts, it could completely change the ball game," he said last August at the Search Engine Strategies conference.
To that end, Norvig argued Wednesday that the idea of conversational search is good for people who aren't quite sure what they are looking for, or who don't quite understand a certain topic. But those who do grasp a topic and want a fast answer are much more likely to use keyword searches, he said.
Corrected at 3:49 p.m.: This post originally misstated the title of Ask.com's Tomasz Imielinski. He is executive vice president, global search and answers. Corrected on Friday, 11:35 a.m., clarifying the W3C did not sponsor the conference.
In March, Radar Networks launched Twine, an application that organizes information and connects people, places, companies, products, Web pages, videos, and photos. Along with Metaweb's Freebase, Powerset (sold to Microsoft), Hakia, Reuters' Calias, AdaptiveBlue and a few other start-ups, Radar Networks is trying to crack the code on building a piece of the semantic Web.
In a Times Online article, Web creator Tim Berners-Lee gave an example of how the semantic Web would work:
"Imagine if two completely separate things--your bank statements and your calendar--spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money."
Twine won't provide that futuristic capability but it attempts to build a "semantic graph" of relationships between content, tags, people and Twines (the collection of items of an individual or group on the service). Each piece of content is a "semantic object," Radar Networks CEO Nova Spivack said, using Twine's underlying ontology and database, which applies semantic technologies such as RDF for storing data.
Spivack told me that public Twines are now visible to visitors to the site and to search engines. So far in the beta phase nearly 15,000 Twines have been created and 354,000 pieces of user-contributed content have been added into the system. More than 50,000 users signed up (34,000 are active) for the service, spending 13 to 15 minutes per session on the site, he said.
A major new release of the Twine platform is slated for release in the fall to address shortcomings and introduce new features. "We have worked on a lot of simplification, reducing the clutter, and we still need to reduce more. Twine has a lot of powerful features nobody uses, so we are moving some of the advanced features out of the way," Spivack said. "The fall release will bring more intelligence and semantics to the surface. For example, we will let anyone define a new type of thing, such as a recipe or baseball team form, to author. It's more like what Freebase does, and we will also likely integrate with Freebase over time."
In addition, performance improvements and algorithms to improve search as well as mining and crawling content are in the works. "A major focus of our work is on personalization and recommendations," Spivack said. "Ultimately, Twine is about 'interest networking' and is a content distribution network. People declare their interests, add content, join Twines and connect with people. As users work with the system it learns about their interests, using artificial intelligence and semantic Web technologies to provide more relevance. We are not attempting to index the whole Web, just the best stuff of interest to users. Ninety-nine percent of what's on the Web is not interesting to a user, so it's more about high signal to noise."
On the business front, Spivack believes that Twine can be an intermediary for users, delivering more targeted marketing messages in addition to content. It's similar to the way Facebook is creating a new kind of environment for advertising based on knowing member interests and their social or semantic graph. "The goal for Twine is to be the place on the Web that best understands your interests and represents them to others. The key is to give users control and privacy," Spivack said.
Twine is a work in progress. It's ambitious and has the potential to demonstrate how a more semantic Web could benefit users. The biggest challenge will be scaling the back-end infrastructure and attracting users, which means Twine will have to become far more easy to configure and use. We'll see in the coming months whether the forthcoming changes to Twine help open the floodgates.
Updated numbers on users and usage, 6:30 AM PST, August 1
Up-and-coming semantic search company Hakia is launching a new social feature next week, called "Meet Others." It will give you the option, from a search results page, to jump to a page on the service where everyone who searches for the topic can communicate.
For some idealized (yet realistic) types of searching, it could be great. For example, suppose you were searching for information on a medical condition. Meet Others could connect you with other people looking for info about the condition, making an ad-hoc support group. On the Meet Others page, you're able to add comments, or connect directly with the people on the page via anonymous e-mail or by Skype or instant messaging.
From a search results page, you can jump into an ad-hoc community around the topic.
It's also a built-in marketplace. People could post items for sale on the Meet Others pages. It's "Google with Craigslist," Hakia president Melek Pulatkonak told me.
You can connect directly with other searchers.
Since Hakia is a semantic search engine, your search queries don't have to be exact to find a related community. "Flu shot" and "flu vaccine" both should get you to the same place.
If you don't want to be part of the ad-hoc community that Hakia will build around every search term, you can just ignore the Meet Others links, and no one will find you.
There's a rating system for posts on the Meet Others pages, so relevant topics should float to the top of the page. I do worry about the pages being gamed or spammed, but I still like the feature. It could be very useful to be able to connect directly with people looking for the same obscure thing you are.
The feature should launch on Hakia next week.
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