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Aussies Could Turn Web Search Upside Down
By Robert Jaques(extract)
Australian researchers have patented a method of exploring the web which they claim could revolutionize existing search engines.
Developed by Ori Allon, a 26 year-old PhD student from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), the Orion search engine is designed to complement searches conducted on services such as Google, Yahoo or MSN Search.
[ecommercetimes.com...]
"The results to the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts giving you the relevant information without having to go the Web site, although you still have that option if you wish," said Allon.
There are different names for this, but some (or many?) call these relevant text extracts - snippets.
IMO what he talks about is yet another attempt to cluster results, an attempt that fails to appreciate that the hard and most important bit is to get top X results in the first place (many if not all clusterer's use meta-searching), and personally I prefer to quickly change query if I don't see what I want in top 10.
IMO anything that does not actually help to refine these top X results is a waste of time. Perhaps those who have fallen in love with clustering SEs would have another view?
Sounds like all it does is gives you some Roget's Thesaurus choices in a glorified scraper format.
Big whoop.
Personally, studying my logs over the past year has shown me that many users have learned to refine their searches on their own. Many users already use synonyms and different word combinations in order to try to get better results.
Unfortunately, those users don't think it is any big deal, and they didn't try to patent the idea :-(
many users have learned to refine their searches on their own
Exactly -- so long as searches are fast and reasonably good, users will learn how to change their query to get results they want in Top 10. People will never switch to another search engine just for the sake of clustering, I certainly would not.
And I am not sure the patent is valid in the first place -- certainly not in Europe as parents are NOT issued for algorithms and "ideas" here.
