 (L to R) Howard Bloom, Peter Norvig, Prabhkar Raghavan, Jon Udell. Click to enlarge. Source: Brian Solis, for DEMO |
SAN DIEGO — Search has become so pervasive on the Web as part of our regular
activities that it’s tempting to assume it will be central to any future Web
advances.
Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research at Yahoo, didn’t get the memo.
“It’s very limiting to think of the Web as merely a mechanism for
retrieving data,” Raghavan said in a panel discussion here Tuesday wrapping
up the two-day DEMO conference. “The next step is divining the intent of
what people are doing and fulfilling their tasks. I’ve always believed
people intrinsically don’t want to search, they come to work to do what the
boss wants…. We have to get further on achievement than the notion of the
retrieval engine as the ultimate target.”
One example Raghavan gave of where search is limited is trying to plan a
vacation. “You spend hours or days from start to end with repeated search
engine queries. At the end there’s a glaring inequity, you the human being
spent all that time, while the combined CPUs spent five seconds on your
task.”
He suggested, in this case, the Web, or software being used, should
understand an individual’s preferences ahead of time, like, a preference for
sunny climates, site-seeing options but not too many museums, etc.
How do we get to these new tools and approaches? Raghavan said it’s
important the industry remember what spawned the explosive growth of the
Internet. “How it came about was openness. The system wouldn’t crash just
because someone put up a bad HTML page. That principle has worked and
openness must persist,” he said.
He also made a plug for Yahoo’s Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) initiative
that basically makes Yahoo’s vast search infrastructure available as a
platform for developers to innovate on to create new services.
The Web as a ‘Giant Brain’
Nova Spivack, founder and CEO of Semantic Web company Radar Networks, said he’s been
seeing a shift he describes as the World Wide Web becoming the Wide World
Web. “With things like geo-tagging and flexible displays that bring Web
access outside the office or home, we’re seeing augmented reality become
reality,” he said. “The Web is becoming more contextually aware.”
Spivack, who served as moderator of the panel, said the Web is moving from
cloud computing to a more pervasive “ground computing” and asked if this
trend is leading the Web to become more like a “giant brain” that thinks and
extends human minds. “And if so, is that giant brain going to be Google?”
Peter Norvig, director of research at Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), scoffed at
the idea. “I think we already have human brains. We don’t want to limit the
Web to what a brain can do, but augment what a brain can’t do.”
Norvig conceded that currently users have to do most of the thinking to
get what they want from the Web. “I think we have to do a better job of
having a conversation with the user,” he said. Google advanced that idea a
bit years ago when it introduced the ‘Did you mean…?’ feature in search
results where the search engine suggests the correct spelling for commonly
misspelled entries.
“But we need to go much farther to both where there is a clear intent and
in cases where it’s more exploratory,” he said. As an example, he noted
someone seeking help for a medical problem might start out a search by
entering a symptom like “funny red splotch” which would lead to many
ambiguous results and repeated queries. “We have to accelerate the process
and not make the user do all the work,” he said.
Next page: The evolving human brain
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Eclectic author Howard Bloom
said the idea of a global brain has been happening for some three and a half
billion years since the first community of bacteria. Bloom, author of
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st
Century, was clearly ready for the topic.
“What makes humans unique is that every other animal comes with the tools
to survive; we come into the world naked,” he said. Bloom said humans have
always developed artificial prostheses to survive and today’s advanced
technology is the same phenomena on a larger scale.
Rather than rely on searching for answers, Bloom foresees a day when computers anticipate our needs. “We need a taxonomy of desire,” he said. “The computer will be there in the morning and give us our ‘to be done list’ and connect us with the
people and service to allow those things to get done.”
But first, Bloom said, “the computer has to learn about me.” Still, we’re a
long, long way from a truly personalized relationship with computers or the
Web. After other panelists noted the challenge of connecting people with the
specific information they need in a first pass, Bloom said, “What you’re
telling me is that these days it’s about as difficult as traveling from New
York to California was in 1848, when 20 percent of those people arrived dead.
We’ve shortened that to six seconds,” he joked, estimating the time it takes
a Web site to load with or without the right information.
“What I want is the ultimate extension of my own knowledge.”
So much left to invent
Spivack wondered out loud with so much already in development, are we in
the home stretch of Web innovation – an idea everyone on the panel disagreed
with.
“There’s so much left to invent it’s ridiculous,” said Bloom. “It’s like
we’ve only invented the first 14 letters of the alphabet and we still need
to invent words and language.”
Google’s Norvig also scoffed at the idea that the main development of the
Web is done. “That’s silly, of course we’re just getting started, though
we’ve come a long way,” he said. “We need to do a better job of
understanding language, images, video and directing the right person at the
right time and part of that is building communities to share these things.”
Another panelist, author Jon
Udell, currently an evangelist and media producer at Microsoft,
described work the software giant is doing to make scientific research
“faster, better and more reliable.”
He described the company’s recently introduced Worldwide
Telescope Web site as a “a
browser for space.”
He said there are similar projects underway, such as one that look to
improve our understanding of oceanography. “Science is becoming incredibly
data intensive and that taps into the data and expertise at Microsoft, so
there’s a nice fit there,” he said.
