Future of Search
3-4 days before i was reading some exciting news about legendary XEROX's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is going to license Natural Language Search(NLS) technology to Powerset, a startup company in Silicon valley that aims to build a better search engine than Google.It's a welcome news as today's search engine market has become unwanted 3 horse race(Google,Yahoo,Windows Live).
NLS is really a great vision and out of the box thinking as today's search market is mostly about advertising dollars.I am sure NLS is on the radars of Googles and Yahoos but it is yet to take off to main stream.Understanding natural language queries and retrieving relevant natural Language information only, presents a big challenge to these companies.But there are other problems like lack of availability of natural language content at disposal on net and the interface to enter natural language still not evolved.Recently companies like IBM,Microsoft invested some efforts to solve this interface mechanism like natural language speach recognition.
In fact companies like Baidu out performed Google and Yahoo in Chinese Market.This clearly shows how important NLS to attract everybody to search information.In India,if you see we adopted English as main stream language in internet search.This forced adoption of English mainly due to lack of technologies which can enable people to search and retrieve information in their own language.This is a clear evidence that there is a big big room for improvement in current search technology and it's far from perfect.
Another interesting development that took place recently is that European Mobile Service Providers(MSP) want to build their own search engine rather than adopting Google or Yahoo to serve their customers search queries from phones.With this they are hoping to trap advertising revenues from Mobile phone search.Currently Google and Yahoo do not share search revenues with carriers and at the same time escalating threat from disruptive technologies like VoIP prompted European MSPs to involve in this collective effort to improve revenue figures.But it really takes a big effort to convince customers to search from tiny screens.
There are other things like Contextual search,Localized search,Optimized results of cross search etc.The message is that at the end of the day customer should be presented with rich search experience irrespective of his mother tongue,location and that seems like a far cry at least for now.
2 comments:
Sra1, interesting notes on Future of search! For a better search one common language is required, so English became the fav. Now if market develops for local language search we will be forced to learn our native language better. I donno about others, I dont remember any technical words in my mother tongue!!
But the problem in country like India is we don't have any direct translated words in our own languages for computer terminology and this has become a biggest drawback.If you look at other languages like French,German,Chinese etc. they are having very well translated terminology for all techno related things and that makes life bit easier when you approach internet.
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