Web search engine |The Semantic Puzzle

the next google

March 25, 2009 by Thomas Thurner, Category: Search Engines, Software Development, Tools & Software

: Image via Wikipedia

Maybe you have noticed it already; today in the morning something new appeared at Google’s search engine interface: A bunch of corresponding search-suggestions based on your search query. Google spoke about this enhancement:

Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

I tried it. So, if you type in “time travel” you also get search proposals like “theory of relativity time travel” or “wormhole time travel”. Google annouced, that the service is available in various languages. The direct test with German is a little disillusioning: Searching for “zeit reise” (which is the same concept as above, in german) leads to alternative searches like “reisen 50er jahren” (travel 50ies) and “reisen im mittelalter” (travel in the medieval).

Even if this semantic-like extension of the basis search function still needs some tuning, the point is getting clearer: Also Google is doing developments to get more meaningful results into their search algorithms. And parts of the semantic methodology are finding their way into mainstream services like search engines – as we have seen with Wolfram Alpha some days ago. So keep your eyes open – maybe next morning you’ll find another piece of the semantic puzzle embedded into one of your favorite web-apps.

Semantic-like tools to pimp your blog

March 9, 2009 by Thomas Thurner, Category: Mashups & Web services, Search Engines, Tools & Software

Presently more and more tools come up in the Web 2.0 – Domain, which bring semantic technologies into blogger´s everyday life. Zemanta was for sure a break-through in annotation of blog entries. I’m running this service on my private and my corporate blog. It is easy to integrate in every common blog-software and it is really a save of time in my daily work. Unfortunaly it is avaible only for english blogs.

Another service which came up recently is Quintura, which provides search capabilities for your own blog with a visual map of tags or hints based on an index created of the own blog entries. It is easy to customize for the own blog’s style with the use of a simple interface. Quintura offers code-snippets to copy to your blog-post or sidebar. Even if it is no semantic search engine in the narrow sense, Quintura provide a fine semantic-like interface for a meaning-sensitive search. See how Quintura is implemented into The Semantic Puzzle at our sidebar.

BarCamp Proposals: Factolex, Social Enhanced Search

October 6, 2008 by Jana Herwig, Category: Conferences & Events, Social Software

Hello Monday! I am a bit tired today as I did not really have a weekend but spent it in a rather intellectually stimulating fashion, attending BarCamp Vienna held on the premises of HP in the 12th district. My head is still buzzing from all the input!

Originally, the plan had been to have a marketing-themed BarCamp, but thanks to the bottom-up approach towards scheduling typical for BarCamps, that didn’t quite come to pass (greatly appreciated also that this wasn’t enforced by the organizers, thank you!). There were two sessions in the ones that I attended that have relevance for the Social Semantic Web:

One was held by Alexander Kirk about the latest improvements in Factolex, a collaborative, micro-content encyclopedia based on facts; I hear that Factolex will receive further semantic enhancements in the near future, so I’ll write a longer blog post about it then. One feature Alex showed and which impressed me considerably was the distributed way in which one can add further facts to Factolex now: On any webpage, highlight a word or phrase (e.g. “President of the European commission”) and then click on the bookmarklet. Factolex is automatically going to check whether it knows the term already and either creates a new one or adds a fact to an existing term. The source will be added automatically – pretty nifty!

Another project that does not yet have a name and that is currently in stealth mode was presented by Christian Zeidler: Social Enhanced Search on del.icio.us. The project addresses a well known del.icio.us problem: You can search your bookmarks, i.e. search the tags and possibly definitions you might have added – yet all too often this only leads to the problem that your search query does not match the tags you once assigned. Being able to search the full text of the saved page would improve the scenario considerably – and this is exactly the approach Christian’s project takes.

To begin with, he built his own search index using Lucene, an open source, full-featured text search engine library written in Java. Of course it doesn’t crawl the whole web – just the pages you have added to your del.icio.us account. Instead of building one index for every user, Christian decided to have one large search index which also takes away the troubles of double indexation – the current index, based on 800 pages, doesn’t exceed a size of 3MB, which seems rather reasonable.

Apart from your own bookmarks, the plan is to also allow searching the bookmarks of your friends on del.icio.us, giving your search perspective. How many friends do you have on Facebook, how many on del.icio.us? It’s about half a dozen on del.icio.us for me, so I guess that “friendship” here really stands for particular topics and interests – this social perspective thing might actually work for enhanced searches, I think.

What other means are there to weight and rank search results? Somebody raised the issue of customization, i.e. let the user define which weight he’d like to give the results of which friend. I completely agree with Christian when he said he doesn’t believe people want customization, as conscious, user-initiated customization efforts are often (considered) too high. Instead, the system must learn from the data, e.g. prefer the results of friends whose results you use the most often.

Another useful feature that is already in place is that you can add any RSS feed to your search index as well – this is indeed very neat. And finally, in addition and as a point of reference, the prototype displayed the Lucene-based results in one column, and Yahoo! Search BOSS results in another column. Not surprisingly, the Search BOSS results were rather general, and the Lucene-based results rather specific – and that specificity is what you’d expect from searching your own bookmarks.

Extending Google: First Look at SemantiFind

September 23, 2008 by Jana Herwig, Category: Collective Intelligence, Search Engines, Tools & Software

Just stumbled upon SemantiFind via T3N, and then upon the review on ReadWriteWeb from last week Thursday.

What’s it about? Semantifind is an IE and FF browser plug-in that extends Google’s search functionalities, most notably through a typeahead functionality that allows you to refine your search results before hitting ‘enter’. ReadWriteWeb wasn’t too impressed though:

Unfortunately, SemantiFind is one of those tools that’s good in theory, but not so good in practice. When performing some test searches, results were not as precise as they should have been. For example, in the above-mentioned search for “Georgia,” a search for the U.S. state returned Google results for the country as well.

Ambiguities due to homonyms such as Georgia vs Georgia, or Java vs Java are among the faves of people who are trying to pitch a semantic tool to you – but I really wonder whether the effects of homonyms aren’t highly overrated? How often do people really search for these, and in particular search for these without context, i.e. further search terms such as in ‘Georgia Tech’, ‘Georgia war’, ‘Java Coffee’ or ‘Java bugs’?

I must say I was quite impressed by the choice of search terms offered, and if you (like me) are easy prey for the serendipity effect, then SemantiFind can please and distract you endlessly. Here is a preview of what appears if you enter ‘serendipity’ – please note the preview of possible descriptions and definitions which you get on the Google homepage with the plugin (click > big):

Once you pick a term it turns into a kind of button (just slightly annoying: you cannot edit a term after it’s turned into a button, but would have to delete the whole thing and type again if you want to change your search query):

And then, what happens? On the search results page, you see results filtered by SemantiFind’s user-generated, user-approved labels on top of the other search results – which irritated me at first as it comes across as a search engine within the search engine. Admittedly: I’d rather sift through 13 results than through 10,900,00 search results (even though I never make it to the end of Google’s search list anyway; does anybody?) – but does the article about trees doing their best work with thermostats at 70Â° really deserve the second rank in SemantiFind’s list of recommended search results?

So while I agree with RWW that this “just goes to show why search engines that rely on people to filter the results might not work. Human error shouldn’t be a factor in web searches”, I am still quite fond of the suggestions and definition previews. I would probably use SemantiFind regularly if they allowed me to configure the plugin in such a way that I’d get the suggestions on the input page, but not the recommended results on the results page.

What’s the source of these results anway? SemantiFind’s recommended results seem to rely entirely on input generated by users – to add input, you need to install their toolbar and start adding labels to websites; if a website has been labeled before, you can confirm or reject existing labels. What’s nice: a label recommender (only presumably the same one that’s used for search queries) reduces ambiguity. What’s curious: You can also browse the pages you have already labeled in what they call your “catalogue” – which makes the service even more reminiscent of a bookmarking service, and which makes me wonder whether one shouldn’t possibly link this with a del.icio.us/Mr.Wong/Bibsonomy/Faviki account (Faviki would probably be the best, considering their tag recommendations are based on DBpedia, and considering that Faviki just added 1 million new tags and now holds more than 5 million tags across all languages)

Questions that remain: I’d really like to know how they maintain their list of suggested labels – ambiguity, typos, plurals forms, i.e. the usual folksonomy issues must be a big challenge. Also, I’d like to know where they get their definitions in the preview from – from Google? Or are these user-generated as well? There must, after all, be some use for the “request a new definition” form?

Too bad they don’t have a blog to which one could send a track back, and there is nothing much on their company page either.

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