Web Search İs Ready For A Shakeup,Says UW Computer Scientist

A University of Washington computer scientist is calling on the international academic community and engineers working in industry to take a bolder approach when designing how people find information online. In a two-page commentary titled "Search needs a shake-up," published in the Aug. 4 issue of the journal Nature, UW professor of computer science and engineering Oren Etzioni calls on experts to, literally, think outside the search box. The piece is being published on the 20-year anniversary of Tim Berners Lee unveiling his World Wide Web project.

Etzioni doesn't mince words. In the article, he writes that the main obstacle to progress "seems to be a curious lack of ambition and imagination."

In a phone interview, Etzioni was more conciliatory.

"The piece is meant to be provocative," said Etzioni. He acknowledged that the leading search engines have hired many smart people – including hundreds of UW graduates.

"Despite all the talent and the data that they have, I don't think that they've been ambitious enough," he said. "This piece is meant to provoke people, to challenge them to go further, to think outside the keyword search box."

Etzioni imagines a future in which someone would speak a question, such as: "What was the score in today's Mariners game?" or "Where's the nearest restaurant that serves great sushi?" and the computer would find an answer by looking through all the data available on the Internet.

It's an ambitious goal. But last winter's Jeopardy matchup, in which IBM's Watson supercomputer trounced the best human players in the show's history, tested a computer's ability to immediately answer complex questions.