msgraph - 7:29 pm on Feb 12, 2002 (gmt 0)

Abstract

In the past year, Google has received wide press recognition and praise for the quality relevant results that they serve to web surfers.

One of the major reasons for this is success is due to their PageRank Technology [citeseer.nj.nec.com] developed by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. PageRank is a technology that scores web pages by how "important" they are in relation to other web pages.

Another major reason is that Google does not over-populate, or flood, their search results pages with two or three third-party databases like various other popular search engines. With the exception of data collected from the Open Directory Project [dmoz.org], Google can claim that their results, both advertised and crawled, are their own.

Google is now in the position to take their search engine to another level that can make them soar even higher than their competitors. A lot of speculation has arisen in regards to what lies ahead in Google's future. A few of the speculations are how and when Google will display personalized results.

The basis of this paper is to examine a few of the methods that Google might employ in their system of providing personalized results. The reason why these methods are examined in great detail is because last year Google acquired a company, Outride,Inc., who researched heavily into personalizing data. Throughout this paper, I will examine some of the research, people, and technology behind Outride's past projects and software systems. We shall never know how Google will implement it with their search system, but at least we can look into the various possible uses that this technology can offer.

Google and Outride

In December 2000, a press release was passed out that notified the mission of a barely known company, Outride, Inc., whose main goal was to provide the internet community with a system that would provide highly-relevant personalized results.

Outride Unveils Mission: Make Internet, Corporate Intranets More Relevant, Personal -- Announces Relationships with Excite@Home, Inktomi & Mercado Software [mercado.com]

September 20, 2001
Google Acquires Technology Assets of Outride Inc [google.com]

Outride, Inc's Founders

Dr. James E. Pitkow - President and co-founder of Outride, Inc.
Dr. Pitkow, previously, was a research scientist at Xerox (PARC).

Dr. Hinrich Schuetze - VP of Advanced Development and co-founder of Outride
Dr. Schuetze was also a former research scientist at Xerox (PARC). His specialties are in language processing and information retrieval.

Dr. Todd Cass - VP of Engineering and co-founder of Outride, Inc.
Like his two other colleagues, Dr. Cass was a research scientist at Xerox (PARC). Dr. Cass specializes in computer vision and pattern recognition.

Since all three of Outride's founders came out of Xerox (PARC), the source of their relevance technology must lie somewhere within PARC's research center as well as in various patents. Here is where we shall begin our journey into Outride's technology.

Looking at Outride's foundation goals, the best candidate to dig up information on is Dr. Jim Pitkow. Dr. Pitkow is a recent alumni of the User Interface Research Group at Xerox (PARC).

The three main projects of this group are:

- Information Foraging
- Information Visualization
- Webology

(edited by: msgraph at 5:25 pm (utc) on Feb. 13, 2002)