Google Buys Orion
The latest ‘revolution’ in search engines comes from a 26-year-old PhD student from the University of New South Wales. And of course Google has bought him…I mean it. I should be noted that MSN and Yahoo were also bidding on the Orion text search algorithm.
Here’s a couple extracts from the press release about Orion:
“The results to the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts, giving you the relevant information without having to go to the website – although you still have that option if you wish,” said Israeli-born Allon, who completed a Bachelor and Masters degree at Monash University in Melbourne before moving to UNSW for his PhD.
“By displaying results to other associated key words directly related to your search topic, you gain additional pertinent information that you might not have originally conceived, thus offering an expert search without having an expert’s knowledge.
“Take a search such as the American Revolution as an example of how the system works. Orion© would bring up results with extracts containing this phrase. But it would also give results for American History, George Washington, American Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Boston Tea Party and more. You obtain much more valuable information from every search.”
Emphasis is mine. Hmmm, that should please webmasters who spend thousands of hours / dollars doing SEO. I’m sure Google is wiser than to think they could put something like that into play without being sued by millions of website owners.
I believe it would be the related branching of the results that is the technology that they would really covet. It is a huge limitation on current searches that the word you type into the query box must be found on a page for it to show up in the results.
It’s like the old joke “Do what I mean, not what I say.” If Google can return the result of what folks are really searching for, rather than just what they typed into the query box, they will take another quantum leap forward in the search engine wars.
Can we expect a shift in Google’s ranking algorithm?
Google buys student’s search tool
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Comments ( 1 Comment )
Michael Muryn added these pithy words on Apr 15 06 at 3:58 pmInterpret what people “might want” is interesting and may be suggested (like google’s suggestion when you possibly mistype a word). But always acting like that will frustrate those who actually want what they ask for.
There is some kind of people that will enter in a wrong-pattern and the other that will not fall in the wrong-pattern.
For example, if I ask the question “You haven’t eat” and you answer is only “yes”.
If I take it how you say it, it mean: yes, I haven’t eat.
But chance are you wanted to say, “yes, I have eat” (with a complement it is way more clearer).
But those kind of question happen often (negation with an affirmative answer) and can be a source of confusion.
Thinking fast, I won’t want a software to expect I said “yes, I have eat”, if what I mean is affirm that I haven’t eat. Just because 99% of the people somehow do the error.
(And yes I know what you mean, you want the search engine to get more smart, and that is good, but I’m probably giving an extreme case where some people, even technical one, will have a different point of view of because 99% of the user expect we mean something else wrongly)