Monday, July 16, 2007

The Future of Search (Off topic)

The head of Google Research talks about his group's projects.

It's short and it's from MIT's Technology Review.

...TR: What are the outstanding problems in search?

PN: In general, we think there are two aspects of it. One is understanding users' needs more. The other is understanding the contents of documents, whether they be Web pages or video. Mostly we look at what the user types in, treat the input as individual words, and count them up on pages and weigh those pages with different kinds of evidence. But we don't look only at words they type in. We also look at spelling variants, and if a user types in a long query, we break it into pieces. Maybe a user meant some words, but didn't really mean others....

Regarding our post last week:
Higher Efficiency Organic Solar Cell Created by UCSB Nobel Laureate and Research Team

Here's a more detailed version (again from Technology Review):
Record Efficiency for Plastic Solar Cells