Thought-provoking article by Wade Roush in Technology Review, 'Search Beyond Google'. Google, of course, works on Page Rank (unlike Teoma, 'which ranks results according to their standing among recognized authorities on a topic, and Australian startup Mooter, which studies the behavior of users to better intuit exactly what they’re looking for'). Despite its advantages, PageRank has a few flaws:
Just as earlier search engines could be fooled by pages peppered with thousands of keywords in “invisible” white-on-white type, an unscrupulous site owner who wants his Web address to appear higher in Google’s search results can easily publish thousands or even millions of junk pages that contain links to his site, artificially raising its rank. (Google says it has ways of counteracting such attacks, but won’t discuss them.) The same loophole in PageRank allows “Google bombing”— a recent phenomenon in which bloggers make a humorous or political point by creating so many links to a given site that it comes up first when users type a specific term into the Google search box. More bothersome to some critics, however, is PageRank’s obsession with fame. A legitimate page that matches a Google user’s search terms perfectly may get buried in search results simply because there aren’t enough other pages pointing to it, notes Daniel Brandt, a Web developer who runs a critical site called Google Watch. A page’s relevance to an individual user, Brandt and other critics argue, may depend on more than its popularity. “Just because the rest of the planet thinks that this is the number one travel site doesn’t mean it is the number one travel site for you,” says Liesl Capper, founder and CEO of Sydney-based upstart Mooter, who believes she just might have a better way. ...Whichever technology hooks tomorrow’s Web surfers, its builder will earn enormous influence — and handsome profits. Some 550 million search requests are entered every day worldwide (245 million of them in the United States). By 2007, the paid-placement advertising revenue generated by all these searches will reach about $7 billion, says Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy. Yet surveys indicate that almost a quarter of users don’t find what they’re looking for in the first set of links returned by a search engine. That’s partly because the precious needles of information we seek are buried under a haystack that grows by some 60 terabytes every day. And it’s why brutal competition in the search industry is certain to continue, especially as search companies usher in a host of advanced technologies, such as natural-language processing and machine learning.
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