[OPLIN 4cast] OPLIN 4cast #328: Inventive searching

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OPLIN 4Cast

OPLIN 4cast #328: Inventive searching
April 3rd, 2013

magazine coverThe search for better ways to search for information 
continues as the Internet "heavyweights" - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, 
etc. - increasingly find themselves in direct competition with each 
other to grab Internet searching traffic. Just lately there seems to 
have been a spate of developments, or rumored developments, that point 
to some innovative things going on inside the companies that make 
Internet searching their business. Since libraries are also in the 
business of finding information for people, we think you might find some 
of these developments interesting.

  * How search is evolving - finally! - beyond caveman queries
    <http://allthingsd.com/20130314/how-search-is-evolving-finally-beyond-caveman-queries/>
    (All Things D/Liz Gannes) "One thing binding together much of the
    work Google and other companies are doing around search these days
    is that they're making it more natural and conversational.
    Conversational search is search that tries to understand context,
    that makes educated guesses, that takes voice input, that parses
    homonyms and adapts to mobile environments, and that understands the
    same user across multiple devices."
  * Better media search through phonetics
    <http://broadcastengineering.com/editing/better-media-search-through-phonetics>
    (Broadcast Engineering/Michael Grotticelli) "The success of keywords
    to find video clips is highly reliant on the amount of metadata
    attached to that asset at the time it was logged into the system -
    and whether metadata was assigned at all. A company called Nexidia,
    based in Atlanta, has developed specialized software called
    'Dialogue Search' that eschews keywords to find audio or video clips
    and instead uses phonetic sounds found on that clip."
  * Is Bing testing "subjectship" rather than authorship in its search
    results?
    <http://searchengineland.com/is-bing-testing-subjectship-rather-than-authorship-in-its-search-results-152224>
    (Search Engine Land/Danny Sullivan) "The two arrows point to stories
    that are about Kara Swisher, with her picture shown
    authorship-style. But she's not the author of these stories. She's
    the subject. That wouldn't be too remarkable if Bing were simply
    pulling a prominent picture out of these stories, similar to what
    both Google and Bing do for news stories. But, with the latter
    example from Gawker, the image shown doesn't actually appear on the
    page. Is Bing perhaps building a knowledge base of people, so that
    it can, in turn, link people or subject images back to stories?
    Perhaps."
  * Microsoft's Data Explorer: Picking up where Bing leaves off
    <http://readwrite.com/2013/03/27/microsofts-data-explorer-picking-up-where-bing-leaves-off>
    (ReadWrite/Mark Hachman) "In some cases, the questions we have
    require data - a lot of data. 'How likely is it that I will find a
    job in Austin, as opposed to San Francisco?' is a question that
    boils down to, at its most basic, two comparisons: the unemployment
    rate within both cities. We've also been trained by search engines
    not to even hope for additional data that might make our answer even
    more valuable: if I'm a nurse, for example, I might like to know how
    many hospitals, hospices and clinics are in each town, the total
    number of beds, and even data for each city such as housing prices
    and the cost of living."

*/PLA fact:/*

"PLA" is not the "Public Library Association" in this context, it's the 
"Product Listing Ads" that appear in conjunction with search engine 
search results. PLAs are now driving 20+% increases in year-to-year 
search engine revenue 
<http://searchengineland.com/cpc-decline-ends-rising-7-in-q1-due-to-mobile-product-listing-ads-153437> 
- which explains the fierce competition between search engines.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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