John Battelle talks to Jon Kleinberg, “professor at Cornell who some credit with work that inspired PageRank, though he’s far too modest to accept that mantle. He says he’s proud that in academic citations, his work on hubs and authorities is cited alongside PageRank as seminal to the current state of web search.”
[Jon] agrees with the consensus view that search is in its early days. The really hard problems – natural language queries, for example, have yet to be solved. “It’s kind of interesting to see how far search has gotten without actually understanding what’s in the document,” he noted. In other words, search has gotten pretty sophisticated using keyword matching, and link/pattern analysis. But search technology still has no idea what a document actually *means* – in the human sense.
Kleinberg outlined one of his core frustrations with search engines, one I am sure all readers have experienced: the inverse search. In this scenario, you know there is a core term or phrase that, if typed into Google, would yield exactly the set of pages you’re looking for. But you don’t know the term, and your attempts to divine it continually bring up frustrating and non-relevant results.
Other areas where Kleinberg sees improvement in the next five to ten years: The addition of a time axis in search results, Local/Personalized/social networking search, “wordbursting”-based search and analytics (a la Feedster/Technorati).
