Semantic Searching

At I.B.M., That Google Thing Is So Yesterday | NYT | 12.26.04

SUDDENLY, the computer world is interesting again. The last three months of 2004 brought more innovation, faster, than users have seen in years. The recent flow of products and services differs from those of previous hotly competitive eras in two ways. The most attractive offerings are free, and they are concentrated in the newly sexy field of “search.”

Google, current heavyweight among systems for searching the Internet, has not let up from its pattern of introducing features and products every few weeks. Apart from its celebrated plan to index the contents of several university libraries, Google has recently released “beta” (trial) versions of Google Scholar, which returns abstracts of academic papers and shows how often they are cited by other scholars, and Google Suggest, a weirdly intriguing feature that tries to guess the object of your search after you have typed only a letter or two. …

Two weeks before our meeting, I.B.M. released OmniFind, the first program to take advantage of its new strategy for solving search problems. This approach, which it calls unstructured information management architecture, or UIMA, will, according to I.B.M., lead to a third generation in the ability to retrieve computerized data. The first generation, according to this scheme, is simple keyword match - finding all documents that contain a certain name or address. This is all most desktop search systems can do - or need to do, because you’re mainly looking for an e-mail message or memorandum you already know is there. The next generation is the Web-based search now best performed by Google, which uses keywords and many other indicators to match a query to a list of sites. …

I.B.M. says that its tools will make possible a further search approach, that of “discovery systems” that will extract the underlying meaning from stored material no matter how it is structured (databases, e-mail files, audio recordings, pictures or video files) or even what language it is in. …

Semantics and the semantic web is where this is all headed—can Google Semantics be too far off?