A State of Search

Recently, there have been a number of search tools to come out. Each featuring it’s own set of enhancements. But, at some point we have to look at the technology and decide on what is practical, and whether it will truly push search forward. With the advent of PowerSet, Autonomy, TinEye, and others we see some incredibly powerful search tools. But, when does that move into the masses? Why hasn’t Google picked up the ability to parse and search video streams yet? Hell, they have a great test base in YouTube…

Search is a hard problem. It’s more than just saying, “This document uses the term Google. When someone searches for Google, I’m going to return this as a result.” Sure that’s part of the puzzle, but it doesn’t involve semantics. Google and others have been focused on web semantics for a long time. But, that doesn’t do anything for native language processing, sentiment, video translation, audio translation, and so on.

The strange thing is that humans don’t work this way. The human brain functions through relevance. So, if someone shows me a piece of paper with the solar system and the planets. And then I see a television show about the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, I can infer a lot of things. Why don’t our technologies?

It seems that we are all afraid to move relevancy into it’s next stages. We have the technology to do it, but nobody is challenging the giants. I think that Michael Arrington got it right and that Tim O’Reilly missed the sentiment a bit. There needs to be competition. But for someone to focus on just an area where “Google isn’t” is not powerful. Look at Summize- Twitter, bought Summize and now has a worthwhile search tool for the Tweetspace as Tim O’Reilly calls it. But, that means nothing in terms of the potential they could have had. If they worked to get into FriendFeed, Plaxo, etc. they would have been the search tool for all of the social networks. This makes them far more powerful as a product, and company. This is what I see happening with Power Set and Tiny Eye. They are too focused on the problem they are trying to solve.

I think that search is the point. Search can bring our seemingly separated applications together. Search makes my blog, your blog, and everyone’s blog relevant. It enables me to write something here and within hours, have it be related to something that a few other people are talking about. So, search is the problem!

What I’d like to see is a search tool to come out with semantic search across all mediums. With Web2.0 and RIA’s on the rise…we need relatable and relevant information that isn’t stuck within the constructs of the conventional internet. This is when search will be 90% solved.