Development of information search technology

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Technological driving force of The Future of Technology in Secondary Education in 2020

Description:

Development of search engine technology. As computing becomes more accessible, the number of web pages (and information) on the internet increases day by day. The same happens in our own computers, where we can now store much more documents than we can read. This creates the need of effective and efficient search engines.

Enablers:

  • Moore's laws. Ever cheaper computing power enables more internet users to produce more information, making it necessary to have better search technologies for finding information on and off-line.
  • The introduction of Google and its aggressive strategy to win the "browsers wars" has benefited all users, not only by making available a better search engine than what existed before, but also forcing other search engines to catch up and improve their own offerings.
  • A recent survey found that over half of search engine users call on multiple services (i.e. Google and yahoo). Nine in ten said their use of search engines has either increased (42%) or remained the same (48%) over the past year. The primary reason for using a particular search engine is the relevance and accuracy of results. (BW Online, 6/11/04, "Google: What Lies Beyond Search?").


Inhibitors:

  • Developing and maintaining a search engine has become a game that requires huge investments that are hard to justify as the main form of income comes from selling advertising. After the tech bubble burst, not many people are willing to put money into that business model.
  • Concerns about non-paid content being influenced by the patronage of the paid advertising. Google and its AdWords gained a lot of attention and market share in recent years. The model has generated profits for the company and has caused others to offer the same. There is not enough disclosure about search rules for editorial and paid content results from search engines.


Paradigms:

  • Information is power and certainly easy access to information
  • Commanding a large share of the market will allow search engines to develop other sources of income
  • Search engines will evolve into intelligent search agents that will help increase productivity


Experts:

  • The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
  • Understanding search engines: mathematical modeling and text retrieval - Michael W. Berry and Murray Browne


Timing:

Some milestones on the development of search engines.

1990
Archie. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of filenames
1991
Gopher indexed plain text documents
1993
World Wide Web Wanderer. Used to obtain URLs, forming the first database of Web sites called Wandex.
1993
ALIWEB was a search engine based on automated meta-data collection, for the Web
1993
Excite. It used statistical analysis of word relationships to aid in the search process. Within a year, Excite was incorporated and went online in December 1995. Today it's a part of the AskJeeves company. 1994
Yahoo. It started out as a listing of favorite Web sites. What made it different was that each entry, in addition to the URL, also had a description of the page. Within a year the Yahoo corporation was created.
1996
Inktomi started at UC Berkeley. In June of 1999 Inktomi introduced a directory search engine powered by "concept induction" technology
1997
Google was launched in 1997 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page as part of a research project at Stanford University. It uses inbound links to rank sites.
1998
MSN Search and the Open Directory were also started. The Open Directory, according to its Web site, "is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors." It seeks to become the "definitive catalog of the Web." The entire directory is maintained by human input.
2004
Paid advertising in search engines and relevance of results (appearing on the search engine as the first matches) have become so important that the of sector of Internet marketing known as search engine optimization (SEO) has grown in importance during 2004. Companies like Backbone Media, Inc. have experienced over 100% growth in 2004.(Market Wire, Nov. 01, 2004; BOSTON, Lexis Nexis). Recent Forrester studies have shown, especially in search engines like Google, that users respond and trust editorial listings more than pay per click or sponsored listing.

WEB Resources:

http://www.webreference.com/authoring/search_history/
http://www.backbonemedia.com/search-marketing-services-PPC-02.htm
http://wx.bsjh.tcc.edu.tw/~t2003013/wiki/images/8/8f/Anatomy.pdf
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&id=307681
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engines

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