Beyond Search: Google Search: An Intriguing Observation. “Net net: The degradation of Google began around 2005 and 2006. In the last 15 years, Google has become a golden goose for some stakeholders. The company’s search systems — where is that universal search baloney, please? — are going to be increasingly difficult to refine so that a user’s query is answered in a user-useful way.”
TechCrunch: CommandBar raises $4.8M to make web-based apps searchable. “CommandBar’s business-to-business tool, referred to as ‘command k,’ was designed to make software simpler and faster to use. The technology is a search interface that sits on top of web-based apps so that users can access functionalities by searching simple keywords. It can also be used to boost new users with recommended prompts like referrals.”
MIT Technology Review: Language models like GPT-3 could herald a new type of search engine. “…a team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranking approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model—a future version of BERT or GPT-3. The idea is that instead of searching for information in a vast list of web pages, users would ask questions and have a language model trained on those pages answer them directly. The approach could change not only how search engines work, but how we interact with them.” Gee, like natural language searching? Like MIT sued Ask Jeeves over?
CBC News: Scientists build better search engine by mimicking fruit fly brain. “Sometimes nature knows best — and that’s particularly true for search engines. Nothing can beat the brain for its search engine, not even Google. And scientists are now designing search engines of the future with the brain in mind — the fly brain in fact.”
Search tech nerds! TIME has a huge article on the challenges facing Google search. ”
Proof of concept: search for videos with emojis. “Called Emoji2Video, the search engine was made by researchers at the University of Amsterdam and Qualcomm Research as a way to show how emojis can be used to give a dense, easy-to-understand representation of what’s happening in images and videos—something that you can comprehend no matter what language you speak, or whether or not you can read.”
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