Comments on: The Future Of Search? It’s 4D Isn’t It?

By: JoeD

JoeD — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:00:00 +0000

Dave,

A really interesting article and you touch on some really interesting points. I’d be interested to hear your views on the current geo-political environment and how future interest rate hikes will affect the consumers interest in the Internet

By: Ciaran

Ciaran — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 14:36:36 +0000

You're right that there is still lots more to come, but if I read your comment right, you're suggesting that all the things in your list are still on the horizon:

# How fresh a document is? An article published on Iraq now versus in 2003.
# How well does the query match superior contexts like the title or the URL?
# How statistically relevant is the document to the query - word proximity, word frequency, word similarity,.. ?
# What is the quality of the document? Press release vs. a blog entry.
# What information can be extracted from the users profile?
# In which parts of the document do the query terms appear - URL, title, abstract, body, meta-data,..?
# Geographical distance- If I search for pizza parlours from London getting results from Milan is not to helpful!

In fact, as far as I'm aware these are nearly all factored into the ranking algo nowadays except for the profile stuff, or at least not to the extent to which it could be, and that's really where the changes will be.

By: K

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:16:51 +0000

Dave,
you touched on some really interest points, mainly the fact that with today’s technology we have access to a lot more informational dimensions associated with a search than in the days when what you have dubbed ‘2-D search’ was incarnated;

And also the shortcomings of today’s search engines that apply a one-size-fits-all relevancy model that they bucket all users into.

Fast Search & Transfer - the leader in enterprise search, have identified these shortcomings and developed a unique relevancy model to both capatalise on all these new attributes of information available to us and put the power back in the hands of the user - allowing her to tune each of the relevancy attributes to their personal preference.

Google bases their PageRank algorithm on ‘link cardinality’. That is, the more links to your site the higher your rank. Furthermore, the more high ranked sites that link to a site the higher the rank.

A clever approach but some other dimensions we can use are
# How fresh a document is? An article published on Iraq now versus in 2003.
# How well does the query match superior contexts like the title or the URL?
# How statistically relevant is the document to the query - word proximity, word frequency, word similarity,.. ?
# What is the quality of the document? Press release vs. a blog entry.
# What information can be extracted from the users profile?
# In which parts of the document do the query terms appear - URL, title, abstract, body, meta-data,..?
# Geographical distance- If I search for pizza parlours from London getting results from Milan is not to helpful!
#…

In turn these are sliding scales that we can adjust according to our preference. Like the scales on a graphic equalizer.

In 2006 the IDC estimated that we created, recorded or copied 161 exabytes – or 161 billion gigabytes. In volume, this is equivalent to the amount of information in all the books ever written – multiplied by three million.
This provides a huge challenge (many say opportunity) for search to harness this information in a way that is meaningful and relevant to the user.

By: Danielle West

Danielle West — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:35:35 +0000

Hi Dave,
Cracking article. I agree 4-D is not far behind though as an ex-pat I find that sometimes geographic/IP settings can be a hinderance if I am planning a trip home or trying to find a nice place to get a gift certificate for friends living abroad.
I also think no one has successfully cracked the UK geo-location thing yet as there are so many different ways to slice that pie (telly regions, county, country, post code, north, south, etc) which makes it more difficult than when dealing with the US. Who ever can prove a leader in the geo-localisation of the UK will be laughing all the way to the bank.
Cheers,
D

By: Xavier Vespa

Xavier Vespa — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 20:49:23 +0000

Hi Dave,
Good thing to point at universal search at the end of the article. Geo-localization (along with mapping) is a hot topic, geo-marketing strategies have been thought, but we’re just starting to see some geo-centric Webplatforms: Fat Door, Peuplade. Still shy to me.

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 11:36:59 +0000

Another thing Google know: exactly how much profit (or loss) you make for them (since they can track your ad click-throughs).

I actually don’t like IP/country-specific search results–especially since there’s no indication that if you did the search in another country, you might get quite different results. (Microsoft’s various properties keep trying to sell me Australian holidays and Australian mobile phone contracts, three years after I stopped living there.)

Compare:

http://www.google.com/search?q=grand+national
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=grand+national
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=grand+national

Maybe they need sliders that indicate and let you control how tailored the results are to your location, previous search history, etc.