The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Search and you shall find

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Saturday, Jun 25, 2011
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Search and you shall find

Staff Reporter

Ricardo Baeza-Yates talks about philosophy, challenges of Internet search

The search engine:The key thing to understand is that people search not because they want to, but because they need to. This, Yates believes, lies at the crux of the evolving philosophy of search.

BANGALORE: Behind the ‘10 blue links' that pop up every time you pose a query on your Internet search engine is an intricate and sophisticated world of code and algorithms that Internet search firms are constantly striving to improvise.

This world has been at the centre of Ricardo Baeza-Yates' universe for over two decades now.

When he started in 1989, the task at hand was a lot simpler, for it involved searching and indexing text in a 600 MB file, the Oxford dictionary. “At that time 600 MB was a lot of data!” chuckles the soft-spoken Chilean, who is the vice-president of Yahoo Research for Europe and Latin America, and has authored a book on modern information retrieval. Later, when the Internet became popular, Mr. Yates built the first Chilean search engine todocl.cl that is widely used to date.

Information retrieval

But Mr. Yates is today known around the world for his research work on information retrieval. Speaking to The Hindu on the sidelines of Yahoo!'s weeklong ‘Summer School' at the Indian Institute of Science, conducted for students and software professionals, Mr. Yates spoke on the future of Web retrieval, fielded questions on privacy concerns and talked about the challenges that lie ahead in the field of Internet search.

The most interesting challenges are motivated by the pursuit of satisfying not only the explicit needs of users, but also the implicit reason behind why and what they are searching. “Then, you don't do the search, we do it for you. The search engine or service basically takes on the role of your faithful assistant that understands what you are looking for, makes suggestions and helps you,” he explains. The key thing to understand, he emphasises, is that people search not because they want to, but because they need to. This, he believes, lies at the crux of the evolving philosophy of search.

Issue of privacy

When asked about the critics of personalising search, including those who feel it is a violation of their privacy, Mr. Yates insists that it is more about “contextualising” than personalising your search experience. “Contextualisation is much more powerful,” he emphasises.

Mr. Yates was referring to the kind of search where you do not go to your traditional query box, but instead, highlight a keyword to get a list of links or Webpages that are relevant to what you're currently reading.

Next step

Making this more sophisticated, offering different types of data in new formats and not losing focus of the scalability of this service, are a few areas he looks forward to working on.

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