Neowin.net - Microsoft : what is next for search engines?

Microsoft : what is next for search engines?

Posted by Mr magoo on 30 August 2004 - 19:51 · 29 comments & 3137 views

This week's edition of The Economist has an interesting piece in its technology section on search engines. Thankfully, not another critique of Google / its recent IPO, but at what we might expect of tomorrow’s search engines. The article talks about research, done by Microsoft, into search engines that can answer questions.

A very simplistic example of how the technology works is this. Imagine a search engine homepage with a text box, allowing you to pose any question - e.g. the question "When was Neowin founded?". The search engine computers would then take the phrase, break it down and manipulate it (in terms of structure, tense etc) and then run a search on that data. The search engine would then return a list of the results; more intelligent engines could discard many (e.g. "never" would be discarded) of the results and leave the users with a list of possible answers (e.g. 4).

The technology is still a prototype, and is currently called 'Ask MSR' (MS Research). Bink has a collection of links and papers by MS researchers on the topic. Technologies like these give search engines the edge, if, and it's a big if, they work well. Dr Brill, researcher working on the system, wants to develop something that might give a fifty word answer to your question (view his research paper - PDF | HTML). The Economist notes that the system works ~40% of the time; not bad, but still needing work.

View: The article @ The Economist | More links @ Bink

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#1 Posted by Lycan on 30 Aug 2004 - 19:59: would be cool yeh to get answers on a broad Question

(1 reply) #2 Posted by moua on 30 Aug 2004 - 20:05: So... when was it founded ?
And what about www.ask.com ?

#3 Posted by daimon on 30 Aug 2004 - 20:07: We also some kinds of prototypes in MS Office. Also McAfee.com had a similar thing on their web site in the past but that was like a text recognition thing. Ask.com is far from achieving that aim, the Jevees is quite dull.

#4 Posted by Sn1p3t on 30 Aug 2004 - 20:15: This sounds very useful for research. I hope they can get the accuracy up to a higher range

(3 replies) #5 Posted by Xenoxide on 30 Aug 2004 - 20:40: Yes, yes, this technology was hyped 5 years ago when Jeeves/Ask came out. And look how completely useless and frustrating it turned out to be.

I can't see Microsoft having much better success with it either.

#6 Posted by nX07 on 30 Aug 2004 - 20:46: If they do things right and such, I think they call put it off to become a useful tool!

#7 Posted by lare2 on 30 Aug 2004 - 21:34: Computer Associates has a safety box named SAMMY, wich also respond customer support related questions.

#8 Posted by brianshapiro on 30 Aug 2004 - 22:01: most searches i do couldnt be formed as questions anyway, though maybe natural language could help in some way

#9 Posted by Goalie_CA on 30 Aug 2004 - 22:01: MS must first realize that the technology they want to implement today will be difficult 20 years from now. Remember in the 80's, everyone figured ai was the next big thing, lol.

#10 Posted by Bundus on 30 Aug 2004 - 22:02: NLP = Natural Language Processing

The biggest hurdle is going to be grammer structure for the 100+ some odd languages out there.

I did a very similar thing in my final project for College. Using an Access Database (shudder, i know), i could type in "When does John Smiths drivers licence expire", and it would come back right...however it was coded with keywords in mind...

so like....

licence
drivers licence
permit

...would point to the "licence" column in the database.....while crude, the technology can be done.

(4 replies) #11 Posted by Jugalator on 30 Aug 2004 - 22:27: "When was Neowin founded?"

If queries like this really worked most of the time, it would certainly become a killer app and very very cool indeed. Also a field Google hasn't dug into (yet), or any other successfully either for that matter. I don't consider Ask Jeeves successful. However, I have no idea how they'd do it. Sooo many ambiguities in short natural language questions, and other tough problems to crack.

I can imagine "Where can I find free porn sites without advertisment?"

It would be pretty cool if it all became a game of forming your question as well as possible. Hehe

(1 reply) #12 Posted by omega3112 on 30 Aug 2004 - 23:01: STAR TREK !!!

#13 Posted by Erich on 31 Aug 2004 - 01:47: There are several companies working on this technology. I know for one, my company, telus. When you call our main number, you talk to a computer with voice recognition and it tries to recognize certain words and grammar etc, then direct you to the right department. Let me tell you this is a WIP!!! But anyways they are regularly improving the vocabulary and grammar and the beauty of the whole system is in that future they will be adding multilanguage support etc. At the moment it's having problem with different dialects

(1 reply) #14 Posted by dhavalhirdhav on 31 Aug 2004 - 04:15: this is pretty cool.. if M$ gets success with it.. then I can see Google

#15 Posted by psykil on 31 Aug 2004 - 05:54: Q: "When was Neowin founded?"
A: "4"

needs work.

#16 Posted by pctuk on 31 Aug 2004 - 07:46: Whilst I think this might be good for most users, I think advanced users will still use keyword searches. I can always articulate a query much easier using search engine syntax rather than natural language. Sure, this technology will have its uses, but it won't be the most useful for everyone.

#17 Posted by Jugalator on 31 Aug 2004 - 09:05: lol, Eric Brill, one of those behind this new technology have a hilarious blog:
http://research.microsoft.com/~brill/blog.htm

(1 reply) #18 Posted by Magallanes on 31 Aug 2004 - 13:29: Q: When was neowin founded?.
A: Some page about the foundation.

Q: ¿Cuando neowin fue fundado? (spanish)
A: a random page.

I wonder how many language it will support.

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