The Next NOT Big

“Chicago Scraps…,” “San Francisco Abandons…,” their blueprints for urban WiFi, thanks to Earthlink’s issues. So, the next big in wifi, has become the not so big…

Ultimate Word Game

Not talking about search engines-although a good argument could be posited for the “word game” association.

Human Brain Cloud…give it a try.

How to Properly Query a Semantic Search Engine

I have been using Hakia.com when I wax completely wigged out over some info I cannot dig up via Google. Hakia, is a semantic search engine in a Beta phase. I was just reading the blog “over there,” which has an intriguing post on the proper way to test new semantic search engines. The biggest lesson I took was this:

“A proper “test” case must include all possible variations of a query/question as listed in the table below. The column called “sampling” indicates the minimum number of cases to be tested for each variation.”

Table-1: Query Types	Sampling
keyword, phrase, sentence, what, where, when, how, why, which, who, is/was/does	11+

—from the Hakia blog

Some Info I Missed on Powerset

Mark Johnson, a Powerset product manager, reminded me that the search engine also offers up search results with some nifty highlighting so you really can see how relevant your search is. Visually pinpoint the data for which you’re sifting on a page of blah, blah, blah–in a jiffy. Very usable.

Will WebFountain Power the Universe Wide Web (UWW)?

What is WebFountain and why do you have to read documents on semantic web to hear of it?

Compared to IBM’s project, WebFountain, search engines and search directories garner attention because they are the surface accoutrements of the WWW. But after reading a bit on WebFountain, I propose the WWW will be left to such surface cyberscrapers and the brutal backbone of corraling metadata will be sweated out in the Milky Way-Wide Web (MWWW) by this.

According to John Batelle, who has recently published a very intriguing book, The Search: How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, WebFountain (WF) dominates the realm of what is too simply called the “semantic web.” Batelle features a lengthy blog post on WebFountain, from which he largely draws for the same section in his book–if you’re interested in a comprehensive tale of IBM’s odyssey. In a nutshell, WebFountain is currently in development-research as a “platform–middleware” (Batelle).

If you can wrap your head around the concept that searching the web is still a fairly primitive, clunky process, then it may be possible to understand that the brainiacs behind WebFountain are carving away at a sophisticated metadata analyzer which could very well be the virtual scaffolding that supports the UWW in the future.

So what will WebFountain be capable of?

Ideally users will be able to propose queries to various portals on the internet designed to drill into multifarious “silos” of data. According to an article in The Economist, users will initially be limited to business, industry, academics–those internet mavens that are incapabel right now of really plumbing the expanse of content and data. Traditional search engines allow us to access an impressive pit of data, but data (keyword) searches are really limited to pits, holes straight down into like data. But search as we know it is not capable of synthesizing teh subtle connections between disparate data sets. Enter metadata tagging. “A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far far away” cyber data was finally intuitively connected….

I digress. What kind of results will a system run on WebFountain’s platform be able to serve up? Batelle proposes examples of the types of complex and unique queries. Here’s one of them: “‘Give me all the documents on the web which have at least one page of content in Arabic, are located in the Midwest, and are connected to at least two similar documents but are not connected to the official Al Jazeera website, and mention anyone on a specified list of suspected terrorists.’” This query clearly asks for data to be returned that are from distantly related sources. Right now Google is incapabel of managing this query, but a semantic-web-based search engine, Hakia, is incapable as well. Hakia reports at the top of the results page for this query that it doesn’t get “the nuance” of the request.

See how WebFountain could be the “next big”?

How Keywords May be Replaced by Old Fashioned WORDS

In the Google, Yahoo! universe keywords have become a commodity–the monetary muscle that drives search development, much the same way as Big Oil has driven energy–up til now. A couple posts ago I referred to the next big push in search–natural language. This sounds way academic for most commoners, but really what it means is this: your next gen search engine may actually be more finetuned to word meanings than your current search vehicle.

I’m a big time Google-head. I do nothing but online research day in and day out. My search capabilities have matured in the last couple years. I’ve gone from one and two-word search queries to whole sentences. For example, today I wanted to know about a rumor I’d heard about a high-end grocery store going in, so I typed in: plans for fresh market chapel hill nc. I was immediately returned a page of results that included two local newspaper articles with the keyphrases: fresh market and chapel hill. I consider that a successful search. But have I become keyword-centered?

When I checked into the Powerset blog this morning I found one of the posts most illustrative of the language flexibility that the search engine will have. The example of a Powerset search query for who proved fermat’s last theorem? returns results that not only correspond to the terms fermat and last theorem, but also understand the question is about a “who.” Not very impressive maybe until I plugged the exact same phrase into a Google search box. My results only corresponded to the keywords fermat’s last theorem, with no apparent recognition of the fact that I had asked a question about a “who.” Results were not nearly as concise as those delivered by Powerset. This, then, is a small indicator of the linguistic muscle being built into next gen semantic web.

Petaflop Supercomputer: What Big Questions Will it Solve?

Thanks to a big OOPS, the world is now privy to pretty specific info on the IBM-National Science Foundation deal–the one where the NSF grants IBM the right to build the world’s biggest supercomputer. Well, IBM currently holds the record with its Blue Gene/L. The next-gen super-duper will apparently take over with the larger (read “more important/costly”) condundrums of the moment. Already, according to a NYT article, there’s a line at this oracle’s gate. Magic 8-Ball….

Perhaps….Not Likely…..Ask Again Later……

BTW: define: petaflop-“one thousand trillion mathematical operations a second.” NYT, IBM Near Supercomputer Contract

Next Wave: Natural Language Search–Alternative to Keyword Centric Search Engines

What if what we’ve come to know as search were supplanted with an alternative? You’d still enter words to conjure the cyber world to commence search, but maybe it would ask for more natural language structures. Powerset, and others that have engaged in semantic web search, are on the leading edge of–hopefully–transforming search processes to a more “natural language processing.”

Google delivers search engine results pages (SERPS) when keywords and/or key phrases are entered into the query field. This manner of search is fast becoming second nature. We, humans, have progressed from one-word, monosyllabic keywords–when flexible and widely available search engines appeared, less than a decade ago–to multi-word, keyphrases choreographed to elicit an imagined search engine response. I enter a phrase that I have learned will likely be “understood” and acceptable to the cyber search forces, but is it natural and intuitive language?

This is not the first time semantic search has been trialed, but Powerset’s efforts are focused much more seriously–less marketing scuttlebutt and more academic vigor.

Might we have trouble breaking with our keyword habit, though? Just when you think you’ve conquered the keyword challenges, launched a keyword-inspired ad campaign through the now ubiquitous AdWords, our language will once again deconstruct.

Is it too late to just go back to basic linguistic instinct? Can the recipe dish up the same opportunities as the current commoditized keyword-centric system?

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…