In pursuit of the perfect search

BANGALORE: Have search engines like Google and Yahoo reached the peak of search technology?

Not yet, if the companies are to be believed. Representatives from MSN, Yahoo and Google spoke about the future of search engines and data mining at the InfoVision summit here today.

“Searching is about answering questions. Most search engines are not doing that yet,” said Krishna Prasad, head of programming, MSN India.

Prasad Ram, CTO, Yahoo, said that the issue lay in having technologies that understand user/community behavior. “The challenge is not just in being comprehensive but in recognizing and anticipating the user's intent and context.

Dr. Gautham Thambidorai, a researcher from Google, USA, said that a lot of content on the Net was still not indexed. “A lot of information is still hidden in languages.”

While most of the search companies felt that they had a long way to go in improving the technology, Jayant R Haritsa, Supercomputer Education & Research Center, IISc said that the search engines were doing a good job in solving hard problems. However, he said that most searches were text based. “Would it be possible in future to pose a query by humming a tune and getting results after analyzing pitch patterns,” he wondered. He added that one of the main setbacks of present day search engines is the inability to construct accurate data relevant to consumers.

Haritsa also called for privacy preserving mining to ensure that user data (such as the information the user searched for) would not be used to misused in future.

All the panelists agreed that more work was needed in terms of personalization and presenting the data in the right context to the user.