Twenty years of web search

Twenty years of web search - where to next?

时间：2013年11月8日 地点：九龙湖校区计算机楼313室

报告简介：

This year, (2013) marks the 20th anniversary of the first public web search engine JumpStation launched in late 1993. For those who were around in those early days, it was becoming clear that an information provision and an information access revolution was on its way; though very few, if any would have predicted the state of the information society we have today. It is perhaps worth reflecting on what has been achieved in the field of information retrieval since these systems were first created, and consider what remains to be accomplished. It is perhaps easy to see the success of systems like Google and ask what else is there to achieve? However, in some ways, Google has it easy. In this talk, I will explain why Web search can be viewed as a relatively easy task and why other forms of search are much harder to perform accurately. Search engines require a great deal of tuning, currently achieved empirically. The tuning carried out depends greatly on the types of queries submitted to a search engine and the types of document collections the queries will search over. It should be possible to study the population of queries and documents and predictively configure a search engine. However, there is little understanding in either the research or practitioner communities on how query and collection properties map to search engine configurations. I will present the some of the early work we have conducted at RMIT to start charting the problems in this particular space. Another crucial challenge for search engine companies is how to ensure that users are delivered the best quality content. There is a growth in systems that recommend content based not only on queries, but also on user context. The problem is that the quality of these systems is highly variable; one way of tackling this problem is gathering context from a wider range of places. I will present some of the possible new approaches to that context to search engines. Here diverse social media, and advances in location technologies will be emphasized. Finally, I will describe what I see as one of the more important challenges that face the whole of the information community, namely the penetration of computer systems to virtually every person on the planet and the challenges that such an expansion presents.

报告人简介：

无

计算机网络和信息集成教育部重点实验室（东南大学）