msn search, neural theory of language
There's another Microsoft search beta out that's worth a look. I think the "results ranking" sliders (under "search builder") are cute but ultimately useless; I certainly consider myself a "power user" but I have never even used Google's "advanced search" page, nor seen the tilde operator. Why? Because the results without any tweaking are good enough to get me what I want. Whenever I see user interfaces like these I remember the section from Joel Spolsky's book about how your users have better things to do than learn the details of your program; they want it to just work. And depending on how well it works for them, people learn less and less, and ultimately that's the way it ought to be -- these tools are only a means for solving greater concerns.
However, they (back to MSN search) do have a question-answering system, though I can't quite figure out how to trigger it except for using the questions I see in the press about it. This sort of thing, if done well, can potentially revolutionize search: search engines are already information portals, but few have been able to figure out how to provide answers directly instead of a list of potential answers. On that note, I got to catch a talk by S. Narayanan yesterday at Stanford about his research at the Neural Theory of Language project, which combined some linguistic theory, some cognitive science (including a slide with MRIs to support an argument(!)), and a lot of computer science to make what sounded like a pretty sophisticated system. Unfortunately, he didn't present any results, though it looks like he has some on his website.
Too many things to think about, always.
However, they (back to MSN search) do have a question-answering system, though I can't quite figure out how to trigger it except for using the questions I see in the press about it. This sort of thing, if done well, can potentially revolutionize search: search engines are already information portals, but few have been able to figure out how to provide answers directly instead of a list of potential answers. On that note, I got to catch a talk by S. Narayanan yesterday at Stanford about his research at the Neural Theory of Language project, which combined some linguistic theory, some cognitive science (including a slide with MRIs to support an argument(!)), and a lot of computer science to make what sounded like a pretty sophisticated system. Unfortunately, he didn't present any results, though it looks like he has some on his website.
Too many things to think about, always.