DEMO Trend: The Smarter Web
Part One of a Two-Part Series
We're moving beyond the days of a simple search box in which you type a query and get a list of results. Today, companies are trying to build a smarter web - one that understands what things are, how they relate, and perhaps most importantly, what things you're going to like. But has Web 3.0 arrived in its full semantic glory? No, not yet. But it's clear we are getting closer than ever before.
The Recommended Web (Xmarks + StumbleUpon)
To begin, there's the seemingly minor announcement from Xmarks, the company formerly known as Foxmarks, but now rebranded thanks to their multi-browser support. Xmarks has introduced additional features to their bookmark synchronization product which include things like site suggestions and smarter search. By leveraging their large stash of data (600 million bookmarks), Xmarks is now able to recommend sites right within your search results. This is done by placing an Xmarks icon next to those results which are most popular, meaning most bookmarked, on their service. Also, when you visit a web site and click the Xmarks icon in your address bar, Xmarks will return a list of sites similar to the one you're currently browsing.
The data used to deliver these recommendations and suggestions are anonymized - a good thing considering that our browser bookmarks are often the ones we have specifically chosen not to share with others. For bookmarks to become recommended in this fashion, they must be fairly popular on the service - a level that's determined by the number of times saved as a percentage within a particular category.
In a way, what Xmarks is doing is very similar to what StumbleUpon's browser extension does too. Like Stumble, Xmarks annotates our search results highlighting those that may be of value to us. Yet Xmarks takes it a step further by discovering related sites, too.
The Smarter Tracking Tool (Evri)
Another company revealing new innovations here at DEMO 09 is Evri, a semantic search engine which understands what's called "natural language." Evri knows the different parts of a sentence (subject, verb, object) and it knows how those parts are connected to each other.
Although still too raw to be your main search engine, Evri has a new "Collections" feature which lets you follow topics (aka search queries) that are of interest to you. After returning a list of search results which include Wikipedia entries, news articles, videos, and images, you can click the star labeled "Follow this" to continue to track that topic. What's missing from this feature, though, is an alerting system which will inform you of updates via email or RSS. However, the company says that's coming later on.
Evri is also branching out from being a web destination alone by introducing Evri widgets which can now be seen in action on the Washington Post's web site. These widgets parse the content on the page to deliver smart recommendations of similar articles both on the site itself as well as elsewhere on the web.
Another new feature launching now is Evri's browser toolbar. By clicking on a button next to the Evri search box in the toolbar, the people, places, and things on a web page are highlighted. Click on these items and pop-ups appear with more information about the keyword, what's related to the topic plus news, images, and videos.
This additional layer of information on top of standard text makes browsing the web and reading articles a deeper and richer experience. No longer do you need to perform web searches in a separate window to understand definitions, context, and meaning. Instead, Evri's toolbar adds an intelligence to the web that was never there before. It's clear that the company is still working towards making that additional layer more accurate and more relevant, though, but conceptually the idea is solid.
The RSS Reader That Learns (Ensembli)
Ensembli, an RSS reader of sorts, takes a different approach to tracking topics than Evri does with its "Collections" feature. Where Evri's UI can sometimes feel a bit cluttered with its multimedia results, Ensembli's interface is simple - you just type in a topic and it will continue searching for new articles related to what you entered. But this reader doesn't simply pull information for you - it learns what you like. Every time you read, ignore, or discard a story, Ensembli gets to know your tastes a little bit better.
While this feed reader is far too simplified for RSS junkies like us, it's easy to see how Ensembli could be a good introductory tool for RSS beginners. Still, the sources it returns sometimes seem lacking and it's hard to say if this will ever be any more useful that a simple Google Alert, for example. Nevertheless, it's not really the feed reading itself which makes Ensembli intriguing, it's the learning element. Whatever algorithm is at work behind the scenes figuring out your likes and dislikes is what's the most important aspect of this new technology.
Getting Smarter...Little by Little
Taken by themselves, the above announcements may have seemed more evolutionary than revolutionary, but look at them within a broader scope and you can see a pattern beginning to develop. In this transitional period from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, we're starting to see tools and services that aim to expand upon the traditional search experience in order to deliver us to a more intelligent web. On this new web, we're moving beyond SEO and PageRank to determine relevance and instead are seeing new technologies develop that better understand meaning, context, and personal preferences.
Stayed tuned...part 2 of "The Smarter Web" will continue tomorrow.
Image credit - dominiekth
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Change is the only constant in life. Thus Internet search will change too.
New rules, new leaders of the universe.
i don't think internet search will change; change is constant; but it's rate that matters; 50 years, yeah, i agree; today, no. desn't matter. no needed.
Long long ago, the ancestors of this was called 'The Invisible Web' or 'The Deep Web' - ie, information not readily accessible via traditional search engines.
It's neat to see how Internet searches evolve.
Data points, Barbara
If the point of the industry is about to beat Google I think that will be really really hard.no matter how advance the search technology build out side Google labs .it is guaranteed that many Google boy will soon enough break the secret code and use it to inspire them to advance search engine of there own,so far www.google.com is the best for me,its not about "technology no more .for me its all about loyalty and I think I m not kind of Judas searcher of my own in here
The Data Web... The Smarter Web... The Semantic Web... Web 3.0... The Application Web... these are all slightly different perspectives on the same phenomenon, a maturing of the web from being single-dimensional, human-readable content into something that could be considered, in its most broadest interpretation, as computing in the cloud. (Instead of just reading content in the cloud.)
Fascinating to watch this evolve.
It's also fascinating to watch the second-order effects of this. My personal passion is how this next generation of the web will impact marketing departments, marketing agencies, and that whole ecosystem. The speed at which new opportunities are opening in that frontier as a result of the web's accelerating evolution is already at a blinding pace. And getting faster every day.
For instance, "search engine marketing", a relatively young discipline, is already very different today -- if you're really paying attention to the edge -- than it was just a year or so ago.
Makes you think...
Really happy to see all this happening!
It's about time all the research money being poured into these fields brings some benefit to end users directly too.
There are so many things that can still be done. I am excited.
bye
Andraz Tori, Zemanta
Web3.0 seems utopic
Why not combine Wikipedia semantic database and Webzzle technology to build the Web 3 explorer ?
www.webzzle.com
More over, it makes a better use of Google in the same time you click "Explore" in Firefox (plugin to install).
The traffic is growing. Webzzle is supported by Sun.
Eric Miller, an MIT-affiliated computer scientist, stood on a beach in southern France, watching the sun set, studying a document he'd printed earlier that afternoon. A March rain had begun to fall, and the ink was beginning to smear.
I actually like del.icio.us better than stumbleupon.. never heard of xmarks.. !
One critical ingredient of moving towards semantic web is understanding of the structured data hidden in the html pages.
At Cazoodle, we have developed scalable technology to model structured data. As our first product---Apartment Search, integrates apartment rentals from thousands of landlord sites online.
http://apartments.cazoodle.com
stHrt.com should be mentioned in the web getting smarter list.
Greetings!
You might glance at isen.org?
Best,
m@
Greetings!
You might glance at isen.org?
Best,
m@
@mattmcb: this wasn't a comprehensive look at semantic web tech - just those making their debut at this week's DEMO 09 conference
Evri is intriguing, but I struggle to see how to use it effectively. For example, I started exploring from Tina Fey (who is listed on the front page--not an edge-case query!), and it never got me to documents that relate Tina Fey to Sarah Palin--which seems like a conspicuous absence. Not that Freebase does any better--maybe it's just a data problem.
But tools like this can't just make excuses about the data--if the user experience isn't compelling, people just fall back to the familiar Google experience. Google doesn't promise much, but it delivers on what little it does promise. Anyone setting higher expectations had better be ready to meet them.
@Daniel. Thanks for the feedback. I would mention a couple of things and hope you take another look. We (evri) really aren't trying to be search -- and expect that right now, most people will start with us either via one of our apps on a website like the washingtonpost.com (look at the bottom of most articles), or via our toolbar, etc. That way, they are already reading about an interest or topic and want more.
The Tina Fey example is a good one -- we do have lots of information regarding her an Ms Palin -- it's just all older, less relevant, and not what people are writing and talking about today. We are working on a UI that lets you find things a given entity (like Tina Fey) page.
Today, you can use our direct query interface to solve this -- which we love but is really geeky.
Try this: http://tinyurl.com/ctsf68 which does the query: "tina fey" > * > "sarah palin" against our system. You would read this as: show me all documents where the two terms are related as grammatical subjects or objects, connected by any activity (a verb).
You might then change this to: "tina fey" > * > [politician]
which extends the query to use our entity category of "politician" rather than just Sara Palin. You just can't do this in a keyword Search Engine -- but we are still getting better ourselves in making sure the best information is available to users when they are looking for something specific.
So, in this case, it's not data but UI and we will nail that soon, I do believe. In the end I agree with your Google statement and don't think there is much interesting to do with the standard keyword search that Google provides -- but there are so many more, and more important, things to to do with content discovery.
@Daniel. Thanks for the feedback. I would mention a couple of things and hope you take another look. We (Evri) really aren't trying to be search -- and expect that right now, most people will start with us either via one of our apps on a website like the washingtonpost.com (look at the bottom of most articles), or via our toolbar (http://toolbar.evri.com), etc. That way, they are already reading about an interest or topic and want more.
The Tina Fey example is a good one -- we do have lots of information regarding her an Ms Palin -- it's just all older, less relevant, and not what people are writing and talking about today. We are working on a UI that lets you find things a given entity (like Tina Fey) page.
Today, you can use our direct query interface to solve this -- which we love but is really geeky.
Try this: http://tinyurl.com/ctsf68 which does the query: "tina fey" > * > "sarah palin" against our system. You would read this as: show me all documents where the two terms are related as grammatical subjects or objects, connected by any activity (a verb).
You might then change this to: "tina fey" > * > [politician]
which extends the query to use our entity category of "politician" rather than just Sara Palin. You just can't do this in a keyword Search Engine -- but we are still getting better ourselves in making sure the best information is available to users when they are looking for something specific.
So, in this case, it's not data but UI and we will nail that soon, I do believe. In the end I agree with your Google statement and don't think there is much interesting to do with the standard keyword search that Google provides -- but there are so many more, and more important, things to to do with content discovery.
It's also fascinating to watch the second-order effects of this. My personal passion is how this next generation of the web will impact marketing departments, marketing agencies, and that whole ecosystem. The speed at which new opportunities are opening in that frontier as a result of the web's accelerating evolution is already at a blinding pace. And getting faster every day.
These technologies are interesting because they are automated, but what about the human factor?
What about after you search? How does a human group and share the information that is important to them in the context of a certain project or client? That is where LiveBinders comes in.
it makes a better use of Google in the same time you click "Explore" in Firefox
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I really think the whole 'smarter' search thing is way overblown. I don't need the web to do the search for me. I don't need facebook to collect so much information about me that they know what product I'm likely to buy next way before I do. I don't need a search engine that shows me different results than others based on my gender, my age, or my past searching habits. I prefer a simpler web that isn't trying to learn so much about me that it can predict me next move before I even know what it is. That's why google is still so popular all these years later. They do 1 thing - search - really well. Just my $.02. fat burning diet low calorie diet
Great article Sarah, Ensembli looks very cool!
thnaksssss
We're moving beyond the days of a simple search box in which you type a query and get a list of results. Today, companies are trying to build a smarter web - one that understands what things are, how they relate, and perhaps most importantly, what things you're going to like. But has Web 3.0 arrived in its full semantic glory? No, not yet. But it's clear we are getting closer than ever before.
Thanks for another great article. Smarter systems will open up a huge range of new web experience for everyone.
A new system for the power users is the topikality continuous research tool. It comes with direct user input for more accurate learning and full text search capabilities on your articles.
Posted by: philscott.myopenid.com
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October 24, 2009 7:04 PM
Man, if the web gets any smarter I know for sure that the Terminator SPYNET will be soon appearing on the horizon. Ensembli and other such programs that learn are just one short (ok, maybe slightly longer) step from AI! Just keep doing your PX90 Workout and hope for the best!