IT TRENDS
Ensuring you find what you seek
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Sometimes, a surfeit of goodies can be self-defeating
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NONPLUSSED: Not so elementary, my dear Watson!, the complexities of the world wide web might baffle even Sherlock Holmes.
POWERFUL SEARCH engines and richly endowed Internet sites, have made our quest for information so much easier in recent years.
But sometimes, a surfeit of goodies can be self-defeating. Yahoo, the portal, which attracts the largest number of users every day — 500 million — gives them access to 3.5 billion pages on its network.
Unrelated results
In return. its users leave Yahoo with 10 terabytes of data to deal with each day and exchange 4 billion emails. Users can be baffled by receiving thousands of results, many unrelated to their search intentions.
The core of Internet based services is information; so the quest of every big consolidator be it Yahoo or Google or MSN — or your favourite, local search engine — is to make sure you find what you seek.
That way, you will come back again and your loyalty will attract the advertisers who pay money to the site to have their web addresses pop up on top.
It is a complex techno commercial operation but it will stand or fall, depending on how closely the results of the search match the searchers need.
"We have to improve the experience," says Prabhakar Raghavan. "People are not interested in the mechanics of search — they just want to get things done. They don't want to spend hours at a keyboard, putting together their travel plan.
They want answers and expect the search service to figure out who they are, what their preferences are."
Dr Raghavan, a graduate from IIT Madras and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley is a well known authority on web search and information retrieval, and consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University. Since July 2005, he has been the Sunnyvale (California), U.S.-based global head of Yahoo Research.
Honing web search
In Bangalore recently to scout for talent to fuel a new research lab in India, he said: "The Web and Internet are utilities now. Looking at Internet through the lens of Search is too limiting... we need to invent a new science which will tell us how people interact with other people, using the Net."
That may be why Yahoo Research these days, is also hiring social scientists, ethnographers, psychologists, micro-economists... Auction Theory and Game Theory are at the root of the model, which determines which advertiser comes out in the top positions in the paid portion of the results.
Successful search engines like Google are known to be wholly driven by computers. Yahoo is known to use ontologists — experts in the study of categories and classification — to determine how to classify a web site or resource.
In recent days, Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia contributed by the users, announced plans to launch a search engine, based on the same user-driven technology.
Interestingly some of the multimillion dollar funding for the project is coming from Amazon.com.
Which way is best?
By putting people back into the seek-and-find equation, Wales hopes to make up for the deficiencies of purely algorithm-based automated search engines.
Which way is best? Time and experience may tell. Meanwhile, Yahoo has decided to share its own thinking and research on the subject with Indian academics and corporates. It will host four quarterly lectures on the science and technology of Internet.
The `Big Thinkers India' series will open on January 8 when Raghu Ramakrishnan, Yahoo Research Fellow and leader of Yahoo's social search platform will talk on `Community Systems: The World Online.'
On April 5, another Yahoo researcher Andrew Tomkins, will discuss `Web Search and Online Communities.'
On July 23, R Preston McAfee, an authority on industrial economics will speak on `Pricing models' and Ricardo Baeza-Yates, of Yahoo Research Spain will talk on `Web mining.' All the talks are being held at the Taj West End Hotel in Bangalore.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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