Search leaders debate semantics
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.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
Most of us who already know how to use the Internet (and have been using it since long before there was a 'world wide web') have long ago figured out that we can find what we need on a search engine by just using the proper search terms... (seriously - Archie was 10000x more of a PITA to search on, and even it gave good results if you told it what you really wanted).
Sorry, but the last thing I need is for some search engine to confuse a lookup of some obscure IT bug with plane tickets or sites out to hawk life insurance (and if you think the current system is easy to game, wait'll they start trying to guess based on content what search users want...)
Seriously - there's a reason ask.com is way the hell down there in marketshare...
It is an irony that the hot tech du jour is a 140 character text system while the academics keep slugging at a solution for which most have decided there is no problem. The Semantic Web is six critics in a balcony discussing a live performance while it is going on. It might be better to just listen.
- by Seaspray0 June 18, 2009 8:51 AM PDT
- Tom, it sounds to me like symantec search will require some kind of fuzzy logic.
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