The Next Big

   The next big, humongous, large, giant, monstrous, gigantic, monumental…

The current biggest thing around is really Google. But if you read anything about Google’s history, you quickly realize that the company that has come to revolutionize the way we find information on the internet, how we shop, and even think, was literally spawned from the doctoral work of a couple of computer geeks at Stanford. Add a bit of innovation, a heaping cup of hutzpah, and voila! A culture is ignited. However, given the idea that what is on top rarely stays on top, one has to wonder: what’s beyond Google? What academic is out there already ruminating on the how, where, and how much, of the next big search engine? Deep web search trawler?

I’m interested in trying to examine some of the ideas that may be percolating along the periphery of technological research. Right now, and thanks to innovators like Google, significant databases of scholarly papers–ie, Google Scholar–are available, as well as a wealth of information on dynamic sites, like blogs. This is what I’m up to with The Next Big Humongous…