|
Search the internet and you shall find
28 December 2004The proliferation of information and data is one of the great challenges facing people, both at work and home. It is so easy to take digital photographs, send e-mails and write electronic documents that families and companies are deluged with digital information. Nobody can sort it all so efficiently that any item can be easily found again. Instead, they need a way to search through this trove.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, realised that search had huge potential a long time ago. Their achievement in building the first search engine to find relevant information on the internet rapidly and simply led to the successful public flotation of their company last year. By Christmas, it had reached a market capitalisation of $50bn (£26bn), reflecting investors' faith in the company's future.
This year is unlikely to be easy for Google. It has woken the sleeping giant of Microsoft, which had undervalued search technology before Google demonstrated its usefulness. Competition is salutary and Microsoft has now updated its MSN search engine to make it far more effective. It has also produced a new way to search for documents and pictures hidden on computer hard disks.
Google's achievement up to now should not be under-estimated. By creating a search engine that assessed internet sites according to how many other sites linked to them, it found a rough-and-ready way to measure relevance. Anybody using Google can easily find the sites that other people think are useful. That is at least a good starting point and it sifts out a lot of useless information.
But there are two big flaws in Google and other algorithmic internet search engines. The first is analogous to the fish-catching problem. Google is a better fishing net than those that existed before, but it is only a net. It gathers up a mass of data from the internet, but it cannot isolate the particular piece of information a searcher needs. It is only a sifting mechanism, not an oracular device.
The second flaw is that Google only searches a thin layer of the world's data. It can find pieces of text, and sometimes photographs, that are published on internet sites or sit on a user's personal computer. But this hardly begins to penetrate the oceans of information that exist in other forms - particularly books and official documents held on a huge number of proprietary databases.
We are now starting to see search technology make inroads into words that are written on paper, rather than stored on the internet. Amazon made a start by scanning some books into a searchable database, allowing those using its site to "search inside the book" for particular phrases or references. Google has announced plans to take this further in collaboration with large reference libraries.
Over the next few years, Google is to scan books from the university libraries of Oxford, Harvard, Stanford and Michigan so that they can be searched online in the same way the internet is now. This should allow people to gain access to an enormous amount of precious information that is currently hidden from view, or only to be found by trawling through books stacked on library shelves.
There are also moves to extend the reach of the internet into data stored on other people's computers and databases. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is among the leaders of a project known as the Semantic Web. This would allow data held in various forms, by different people and organisations, to be shared across these boundaries.
Some of these projects will take years to come to fruition, but they provide a hopeful outlook for those struggling to find one document or e-mail among thousands. If technology continues to advance as rapidly as in the recent past, it will steadily become easier to find what you are looking for in the ocean of data.
Source: Financial Times
All trademarks and copyrighted information contained herein are the property of their respective owners.
Related Internet Articles
|
 | Unlimited Domain Hosting Only $10 a Month
Founded in 2002, Hostgator.com, LLC has quickly grown from its humble beginnings in Boca Raton, Florida into one of the most respected names in the web hosting industry. Renowned for exceptional customer support and unrivaled in terms of customer satisfaction, Host Gator is poised to take the lead in the highly competitive and densely populated world of web hosting providers.
For more information!
Click Here |
|
|
 | Got Root?! 1&1 Dedicated Servers starting at $99 mo.
We guarantee the highest product quality, top security, and unshakeable reliability. 1&1’s advanced Data Centers have been built from the ground up using the most advanced technology available, giving our global network a strength that is beyond doubt. The power and stability of 1&1’s systems allows us to be first to market with web products that are innovative yet dependable.
For more information!
Click Here |
|
|
 | Get a full dedicated server starting at just $29.95!
ServerPronto is a dedicated hosting subsidiary of Infolink, one of a few profitable Data Center Corporations in the world. From it's beginning in January 1999, Infolink served the "Value Orientated" segment of the Internet market. Not by offering a sub-standard product at a low price, but by offering a top-quality, feature rich product at an incredible price. Since the beginning Infolink has enjoyed dramatic growth while other's in the industry have suffered. We operate our own network in the USA and maintain redundant Fiber Optic Rings which allow us to directly peer with Tier 1 Internet Backbones.
For more information!
Click Here |
|
|
