Meeting review: Notes from Boston 2000 search engine meeting

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, Aug/Sep 2000 by Schwartz, Candy

Just under 300 people attended the fifth North American Search Engines conference, sponsored by Infonortics, and held in Boston, April 10-- 11, immediately after the ASIS Information Architecture Summit. With Ev Brenner as a genial master of ceremonies, and Infonortics President Harry Collier making sure everything ran as scheduled, some 25 speakers representing the search engine industry and the research community reviewed the current state of search engines and looked around the corner to the future. Most of the PowerPoint presentations are available at the conference site

www.infonortics.com/searchengines/ boston2000pro.html

and I will restrict my comments to a general overview.

Providers of search services face several interesting design conflicts. The foremost from the commercial point of view is the desire to please users by giving them satisfactory answers (resulting in their clicking away from the search site) weighed against the need to keep users at the site so that their eyeball count (i.e., viewing of advertising) can be maximized. Another design problem stems from wanting users to have confidence that the search service includes "everything on the Web" against the difficulty of performing good ranking in an environment of huge databases and two-word queries. While attempts to solve these problems are many and various, the following themes emerged during the conference:

* Size matters.

* Magnetism (the new stickiness) is what every one is aiming for.

* Context (interpreted many ways) counts

* The human individual, on both the producer and user side, is going to be the focus of attention in attempts to improve satisfaction - if not necessarily retrieval.

These themes provide some common threads in the discussion below.

Coverage

"We have the biggest search engine" is a nice marketable, concrete and understandable statement, certainly more so than "we give you a better search experience." No matter what the presentation topic, most search engine representatives managed to slip in some indication of database size. Various figures were used to suggest Web and Web user growth - for instance, Knut Risvik (FAST Search & Transfer, Norway) reported that the Web is doubling in size every eight months, and by 2005, 95% of over one billion wireless devices will be Internetenabled. Even though less than 25% of Internet content is accessible to search engine discovery tools, trawling through that portion in a timely matter presents a large hurdle and will require adaptive crawling algorithms and scalable search engine architecture.

In his first-session overview, Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Watch) pointed out that self-reporting is always suspect and that size may not be the same as what is actually being searched, as some may report what has been crawled but not what has been indexed or retained. He also observed that although professional searchers familiar with search tools may actively seek out larger databases, bigger is not necessarily better for most casual users suffering from overload (the phrase used was "dumping a haystack on their heads"). Nonetheless, search logs indicate that at least 25% of queries are unique, and coverage is therefore important. Both Inktomi aDd Northern Light representatives alluded to plans for capturing, de-duplicating, analyzing and organizing the entire Web (however that might be defined).

Search engine logs suggest that queries are getting richer, or at least more "natural," in expression (someone called this the Ask Jeeves effect), but most are still one or two words long and often typographically challenged. Tweaking ranking algorithms can only go so far in meeting the challenge of producing relevant results in answer to poorly formed queries, and so a host of alternative or collateral approaches have emerged.

Popularity

Direct Hit has proven that incorporating popularity, that is, the behavior of past users - including not only that a page was viewed, but also how much time was spent viewing it can be a profitable strategy, and many other services are either using Direct Hit or developing similar methods. Link popularity, very successfully implemented by Google, is based on the degree to which a page is linked to by others, and here again success is breeding widespread adoption.

Concept-Based Searching

In the past, the notion of using "concepts" has been directed to expanding queries. Excite, for example, incorporated a form of query expansion almost from the beginning but largely behind the scenes, and any number of services present users with suggested associated terms following a search. What seems to be new now are more proactive attempts to use associations (or intellectually constructed term taxonomies) to try to help users disambiguate query terms. While some are still in development, Simpli.com and Oingo are two recent working examples.

Human Power

The phrase human powered was used frequently to refer to intellectual creation or augmentation of search tools. One obvious manifestation is the directory approach, popularized by Yahoo and presented to some degree or other by almost every search engine. Of course, not all classification methods are entirely human-powered - Northern Light has been using a combination of intellectual and algorithmic means for classification for some years, and taxonomy building tools (see, for example, Semio Corporation) are becoming popular and widespread. Another example of human power is the use of editors or "guides," as found with About.com and Ask Jeeves.