“Search engines are so powerful. And they are so pathetically weak.”
Pretty bold statements from such a friendly-looking face, but technology reporter James Fallows isn’t going for subtlety in this NY Times article titled, Enough Keyword Searches. Just Answer My Question.
Fallows uses a failed information query as the basis for an article which criticizes major search engines such as Google, Ask Jeeves and others for failing to provide results that extend beyond simple keyword search.
There’s some of the same-old, same-old talk of search innovations such as Answers.com and Clusty that we’ve already heard of, but most interesting is the discussion of a largely unknown government project that aims to change the way we search data sources for relevant answers.
The AQUAINT Project (Advanced Question & Answering for Intelligence) is a joint effort by the NSA, the CIA, and several other federal intelligence organizations devoted to:
“Innovative, creative, high-risk, high-payoff research to achieve significant advancements in technologies and methods for advanced question answering against large heterogeneous collections of structured and unstructured information of multiple media and genre types (including structured and unstructured text, speech, document images, other multi- media) in English and multiple foreign languages, as well as video, images, geospatial, and abstract data,”
which in post 9/11 government-speak most likely means:
‘We’re going to get a lot of scientists involved and spend a lot of money to improve the way people search for information, the first of which being making it easier to find those kooky terrorists (or harass everyday citizens, you know – whichever comes first).’
Diverse commentary from the readers of Slashdot here.
Good post. I think Fallows is suffering from the same kind of frustration others are being to feel. It’s what happens when the thing you were amazed by five years ago isn’t getting noticably better (and in some cases, is getting noticably worse). I like to call it “results fatigue” which happens when you’re tired of pages upon pages of results and want something more specific.
But Google is working on trying to fix this problem. They all are. But will they get there, that’s the biggest question. Some signs seems promising, like Ask’s new Web Answer, but they’re still all keyword systems.
If only there was a system that understands language and the connections between the words. Hmm, sounds familiar…