Wednesday, January 18, 2006
John Battelle and the Future of Search
In an article posted the other day on CNN.com, John Battelle, who has become something of a celebrity pundit on Search technology primarily through his highly successful book, The Search, how Google and it's rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture, was asked about what he saw as the future of search. According to him, social searching will be a focus. Check out this excerpt:
"CNN: What is the next big thing on the Web?"
JB: "The idea to create a semantic Web where everything is described not by one researcher and his team but rather by all of us as we root about the Web. I might say, "This is a picture of a seaside with a sunset," but someone else comes and says, "No this is a picture of a beach in Thailand," and another person comes along and says, "This is a picture of a place I like to go diving." And over time, this one object, and every object in the world gets thusly tagged, gets enough intelligence around it that it can be found no matter how you might ask for it, the brittleness problem is solved.
The idea is that we might get to the point where everything in the world of value is in the index correctly, is on the Internet and some way represented, whether it's your car, your child or whether it's a media object like a page or an audio file or whatever, or in this case a picture. And then you create these vast semantic attachments to everything and that becomes the seedbed for the next generation of search to crawl and make sense of.
That's a long way off but we are starting to see any number of applications that are making this possible right now where people are starting to tag things and create engines based on those taggings and we are just seeing the beginnings of it. Whether it will be the next great breakthrough in search remains to be seen but it is a promising development."
Hey, John, we get 'ya, and we agree. We believe only people can really index the universe in ways that people can access quickly and easily. It's science. That's one of the big ideas behind prefound.com. It's the future and it's great to be a part of it.
"CNN: What is the next big thing on the Web?"
JB: "The idea to create a semantic Web where everything is described not by one researcher and his team but rather by all of us as we root about the Web. I might say, "This is a picture of a seaside with a sunset," but someone else comes and says, "No this is a picture of a beach in Thailand," and another person comes along and says, "This is a picture of a place I like to go diving." And over time, this one object, and every object in the world gets thusly tagged, gets enough intelligence around it that it can be found no matter how you might ask for it, the brittleness problem is solved.
The idea is that we might get to the point where everything in the world of value is in the index correctly, is on the Internet and some way represented, whether it's your car, your child or whether it's a media object like a page or an audio file or whatever, or in this case a picture. And then you create these vast semantic attachments to everything and that becomes the seedbed for the next generation of search to crawl and make sense of.
That's a long way off but we are starting to see any number of applications that are making this possible right now where people are starting to tag things and create engines based on those taggings and we are just seeing the beginnings of it. Whether it will be the next great breakthrough in search remains to be seen but it is a promising development."
Hey, John, we get 'ya, and we agree. We believe only people can really index the universe in ways that people can access quickly and easily. It's science. That's one of the big ideas behind prefound.com. It's the future and it's great to be a part of it.
