Forum Moderators: bakedjake
USING search engines to compile a list- like the top 50 greatest blues guitarists by record sales, say- involves a lot of drudge work because you have to visit many web pages to gather the data you need. But the next step in search engine technology could make creating such lists possible with a single mouse click. KnowItAll, a search engine under development at the University of Washington, Seattle, trawls the web for data and then collates it in the form of a list.
[eurekalert.org...]
Googling could become a thing of the past if an all-powerful search engine under construction becomes reality. KnowItAll allows anyone to compile a comprehensive list of any subject at the click of a button. The system, being developed at the University of Washington in Seattle, works by trawling the Web for data and generating information that almost certainly does not exist on any one single web page.
Google IPO frenzy making the media take interest in any new search project?
"...we are developing KnowItAll --- a
domain-independent system that extracts massive amounts of information from the web in an automated, open-ended manner.
So they're extracting information from web sites. And how will those web sites be credited? If they take data from my web site, and I don't stand to gain traffic from their "search engine", shouldn't I be upset? Seems like a fine line they may be walking here with this extraction plan....
From a user's perspective, cool!
WBF
Consider the liberties they've taken with their caching of websites...and, it starts to make a whole lot of sense that this would be the next evolution of their "snippets" eg, the webquotes, thesaurus, etc data that they gather currently.
Agreed, as a user, could be great! As a website owner...hm, what's the user agent so I can add it to my robots.txt file?
