Nano2Sol by Marc Boucher

The afternoon sessions started with the awarding of the first Everett Brenner Award award for the Best Contribution to Knowledge at the 2006 Search Engine Meeting. The winner was Stavros Macrakis formerly of Lycos and now with FAST and who ironically is scheduled to be the last speaker this afternoon and of the conference.

The sessions this afternoon dealt with web and intelligent tools. The first speaker was Paul Thompson of Dartmouth College. His talk “Search and Misinformation in Intelligence and Security Informatics” was quite interesting in that it deals with a relative little researched area. He said a what was needed was a new science along the lines of bioinformatics. Fraud was increasing and he cited one prominent journal which reported that at least 20% of accepted manuscripts, let alone those not accepted, contained at least one occurrence of fraud. He went into some detail of his research done over the last few years. His paper will be online Friday at the conference web site for those interested in this subject.

The second talk was by Bob Wyman of PubSub titled “Searching the Future”. He focused primarily on his products and themes of “Prospective Search” and what he calls “Structured Blogging“. He said the future of search lies in the grey web. The grey web he states is the changing and structured web, meaning it changes too fast for traditional search engines to capture the data. While he was talking I tried one of his products, the prospective search on their main web site. Basically you enter a search term or phrase and their search system will provide you with different ways to then track the searches. I used the RSS XML feed in my RSS data aggregator. And it worked as advertised, however after of a couple of days of testing I’ve found the results to be poor. This product seems to go hand-in-hand with their structured blogging plug-in. Which somehow I suspect is geared towards helping their web crawler classify the data.

Next up was Elizabeth Liddy of Syracuse University talked about leveraging the unrealized value in trouble tickets. While the talk was interesting in some respects it really had little interest to me. So I have little to say about it other than I found it interesting that call center software developers tend to develop sub-languages that it turns out is quite useful in increasing productivity.

The last speaker of the day was Stavros Macrakis, who as I noted earlier had won the Everett Brenner Award earlier in the day. He spoke about automatically generated summaries of web content, and in particular focused on the Lycos retriever. He did an overview of both the Lycos search products, the main Lycos search engine and Hot Bot. He said their market share is about 1/2 of 1%, ouch. This might be one reason he has just left Lycos to work for FAST. The Lycos Retriever is completely automated which meant lower editorial costs, had broad coverage and the interface they used for the results provided useful content-rich summaries which is what the user wants. Probems he mentioned with search include results overload, too much navigation and advanced search which he said people just don’t use. He also said users preferred source info and other indications of quality and trustworthiness in determining whether to click on the search results link. And one interesting last note was that he felt verticals searches are better than broader search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Most of presentations can be found on the Infonortics web site.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 28th, 2006 at 9:53 am and is filed under Search Engine Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.