By Ran Geva The Omgili Blog:

Every now and then, a new search engine (usually in stealth mode) is promising to be the next Google. Heck, even better than Google! Much better!!! They don’t want to be called “Google Killers” (high expectations?) but that’s exactly the buzz they are trying to create.

Usually the buzzing is around a new semantic technology or sometimes other words such as “Human Search” or “Collective Intelligence” and other terms a CEO blurbs to a VC.

The common premise is simple: the Internet is big. very very big. ever expanding. too much information. Google doesn’t bring back relevant results from time to time. We (the buzz search company) will offer better relevancy because we have an ex-googler on our team – hooray.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I wish good luck to us all (I own a search engine – although no ex-googlers on our team). We all try to bring something to the table, slice, dice and hopefully create something helpful and useful for our users. The cynical tone in the above lines just conveys my feelings about the unnecessary buzz and shear amount of it about these “new disruptive technologies” that in most cases turn out to be nothing at all.

What I want to see

The next “Google-Killer” shouldn’t be a search engine that brings back more relevant results. The next search engine shouldn’t be a Search Engine at all. (…pause for surprise and suspense).

The next “Google-Killer/Slayer/Buyer” should utilize the data it covered to create a knowledge base where it can deduce new information and answer user’s queries not with pointers to articles, but with new information it created on top of the knowledge it accumulated.

An answer to the question “Is Elvis Presley an alien?” should not return references to elvisinfonet.com and toppun.com articles. I don’t want to read that – I have A.D.D. Give me the answer! Probably something like:

“Probably not. Elvis Presley is a performer, a singer and an actor. He was born on January 8, 1935 and died on August 16, 1977. It has been popularly suggested that he has been abducted by aliens, or that he is actually an alien who faked his own death so he could return to his home planet.

In Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams, Elvis is discovered by Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent working as a bar singer on an alien planet, and owning a large pink spaceship.”

Of course, all the sources where the system deduced the information from should be referenced as hyper links inside the text.

Cool! This is buzz worthy. When you think about it, it’s quite simple… The system (Let’s call it G-Dooms-Day) should recognize the keywords “ Elvis Presley” as a name (using the above semantic technology we mentioned), make an internal search on its database, extract all knowledge about it and structure the relationships between the entities it finds, do the same for the keyword “Alien”, compare between the two and send the results your way - simple!

Obviously it is not simple, actually I think it’s borders the impossible. But hey you wanted a disruptive technology - here it is. And I will tell you another thing, the day this technology will become a reality Sergey & Larry will cash their Gstocks and run for the hills (to build a huge mansion with the money they just got).

This is my vision for the Google-Killer, and I hope I won’t get disappointed when those stealth search companies uncloak to reveal their uber-cool search engine.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 10:47 am and is filed under Guest Authors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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