Ms Dewey

Circa 1999. A friend of mine asked me what search engine I use. I answered, "Mostly yahoo, sometimes altavista, and rarely hotbot." He responded, "Crazy? You're a waste. You don't know Google?" What the heck was that? I had to check it out if I should sound like a geek during our ensuing conversations. I visited google.com for the first time in the Nungambakkam Apex Plaza dishnet internet cafe. Wow... what a minimalistic UI... 'Cool interface', I thought. However, what bowled me over was when google.com responded with the no. of milliseconds it took to find results. And, to confirm what it said, the results page loaded in less than a second. This was unheard of for me. I fell for the search engine.

Come back to 2006. Google has become a household name in every house that boasted an internet connection. Searching has become 'Googling'. But, what's the future of search? Trying to understand the user's intention? For example, suppose a user, say Joe, searches for ' live cricket scores'. He clicks various links and then comes back to the search site. He then, say, searches for 'Australia cricket'. Wouldn't it be nice if the search engine shows ICC results page as the first result because the user probably wanted to know about australian cricket and its showing in the champions trophy? It would definitely be! Today, few search engines remember a history of all your searches to try and understand what kind of a person you are so search results can be tailored to the individual. But this is not incorporated yet due to lack of solid modelling techniques. This in itself will be a thesis paper for a Ph.D degree so let me stop at this.

While things like what I said above could come in the future, Microsoft has already released a new type of some sort of a futuristic, interactive search engine - http://www.msdewey.com/. This search mashup is based on the Live search engine developed by Microsoft. This reminds me of 'The Time Machine' movie's interactive librarian. But, this search has to go a long way to go to become something similar to the one shown in the movie. Yet, this is a creditable good first effort. I want to see MsDewey evolve into some sort of an answering engine rather than remain a talkative commentator who just rolls out search results. On a tangential note, try searching for few words and after some time, try some filthy words twice or thrice! :-) See the results for yourself! Nice one!!