Abstract
The classic Web search experience, consisting of returning “ten blue links” in response to a short user query, is powered today by a mature technology where progress has become incremental and expensive. Furthermore, the “ten blue links” represent only a fractional part of the total Web search experience: today, what users expect and receive in response to a “web query” is a plethora of multi-media information extracted and synthesized from numerous sources on and off the Web. In consequence, we argue that the major technical challenges in Web search are now driven by the quest to satisfy the implicit and explicit needs of users, continuing a long evolutionary trend in commercial Web search engines going back more than fifteen years, moving from relevant document selection towards satisfactory task completion. We identify seven of these challenges and discuss them in some detail.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Aberdeen, D.: Email overload? try priority inbox. The Official Gmail Blog (August 2010), http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/email-overload-try-priority-inbox.html
Baeza-Yates, R., Raghavan, P.: Chapter 2: Next generation web search. In: Ceri, S., Brambilla, M. (eds.) Search Computing. LNCS, vol. 5950, pp. 11–23. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Baeza-Yates, R., Ribeiro-Neto, B.: Modern Information Retrieval. Addison-Wesley, Harlow (2010)
Brin, S., Page, L.: The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on World Wide Web, Brisbane, Australia (1998)
Broder, A.: A taxonomy of web search. SIGIR Forum 36(2) (Fall 2002)
Cucerzan, S., Brill, E.: Spelling correction as an iterative process that exploits the collective knowledge of web users. In: Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Barcelona, Spain (July 2004)
Dalvi, N.N., Kumar, R., Pang, B., Ramakrishnan, R., Tomkins, A., Bohannon, P., Keerthi, S., Merugu, S.: A web of concepts. In: PODS, pp. 1–12 (2009)
Donato, D., Bonchi, F., Chi, T., Maarek, Y.: Do you want to take notes? identifying research missions in yahoo! search pad. In: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, pp. 321–330 (2010)
Dupont, C.: Stars make search more personal. The Official Google Blog, March 3 (2010), http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/stars-make-search-more-personal.html
Eiron, N., McCurley, K.S.: Analysis of anchor text for web search. In: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Informaion Retrieval, SIGIR 2003, pp. 459–460. ACM, New York (2003)
Goel, K., Guha, R., Hansson, O.: Introducing rich snippets. Google Webmaster Central Blog (May 2009), http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html
Joachims, T.: Optimizing search engines using clickthrough data. In: Proceedings of the Eighth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2002, pp. 133–142. ACM, New York (2002)
Kleinberg, J.: Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. In: Proceedings of the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, pp. 668–677 (1998)
Mayer, M.: Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer.The Official Google Blog (May 2007), http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/universal-search-best-answer-is-still.html
Mayer, M., Menzel, J.: More search options and other updates from our searchology event. The Official Google Blog (May 2009), http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-search-options-and-other-updates.html
Merrill, D.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syKY8CrHkck#t=22m11s at timestamp 22m11s
Mika, P.: Microsearch: An interface for semantic search. In: Proceedings of the SemSearch 2008 Workshop on Semantic Search at the 5th European Semantic Web Conference, Tenerife, Spain (June 2008), http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-334/
Ramakrishnan, R., Tomkins, A.: Toward a peopleweb. IEEE Computer 40(8), 63–72 (2007)
Rose, D.E., Levinson, D.: Understanding user goals in web search. In: WWW 2004: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 13–19. ACM, New York (2004)
Searchmonkey, http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/
Surowiecki, J.: The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Random House (2004)
Wright, J.: This week in search 10/16/10: Renaming google suggest. The Official Google Blog (October 16, 2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baeza-Yates, R., Broder, A.Z., Maarek, Y. (2011). The New Frontier of Web Search Technology: Seven Challenges. In: Ceri, S., Brambilla, M. (eds) Search Computing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6585. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19668-3_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19668-3_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-19667-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-19668-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)