It may be reaching ubiquity, but Google has just scratched the surface of the Web. In fact, computer scientist Weiyi Meng at Binghamton University is already working on Google’s replacement: a search engine that can give you straightforward answers to questions like “Who is Einstein,” instead of simply listing relevant URLs.
The metasearch engine would tap into the million or so search engines around the world, and present a more complete and accurate list of search results by searching the “deep Internet.” While the surface Web—the part of the Web that is indexed by search engines—has about 60 billion pages, the deep Web has about 900 billion pages—and because Google has not been designed to dig deeper, many of those pages are out of reach.
The new search engine would presumably do every bit of brain work for you, so when you type in “economic crisis,” it produces a report that sums up every major opinion on topics such as AIG bonuses, job losses, and the Bernie Madoff scandal—saving you from having to read through hundreds of Web sites before coming to your own conclusion.
Of course, it’s worth asking: If the metasearch engine is built, then won’t it make us even stupider than Google already has?
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Image: flickr/ violinha
March 26th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
I think you would still need analysis of the results, even if the questions are easier. It would be cool to have a selection of thoughts instead of just a list of URL’s and a short summary.
March 26th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Of what value is a search engine delivering a megabyte of text without structure? We already have Microcrap’s answer.com and newspapers. Data is not knowledge, propaganda is not knowledge. As we say in the lab, “a single failed reaction is a setback. A million failed reactions are a combinatorial library.” Feeding the array is not synonymous with net retained earnings. If you want to find the bottleneck, the first place to look is at the top of the bottle.
March 27th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Sounds like a good concept but it is going to be very hard to determine the trust of the “deep web.” Google has developed some very sophisticated algorithms to determine trust, relevancy and popularity and, by the nature of the deep web being out of reach and therefore mostly without these signals, I don’t see how they will be able to produce reliable results.
March 29th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
So, essentially we will let a computer give an opinion for us? This seems like a terrifying idea.
May 20th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
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