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Searching
Smarter, Not Harder using Topic Maps Wired,
November 30, 2004
Databases and search engines provide instantaneous access
to endless information about anyone or anything, but the search
results often include as many misses as hits. To generate
more-relevant answers, organizations including the federal
government are using topic maps to index their data.
?? search engines such as Google could take advantage
of topic maps to increase the accuracy of web search without
any changes to the web pages they are indexing. He said the
Open Directory Project
is already taking advantage of topic maps"
" ... topic maps would allow a LexisNexis
query of the word "Iowa" to differentiate between
the University, the state and the jurisdiction. "It makes
sense to present the multiple choices (of context) before
returning all of the results,".... ? Read
the whole story...
A look inside the world
of search from the people of Yahoo! An Interview
with Tim Converse
JQ: You've said that your group is charged with content classification.
What exactly is content classification and why is it important
to search?
A: Well, the more we know about documents the better. So part
of what the Classification group does is label web pages and
sites, or put them into categories. And while I can't get
into specifics about the categories we use, a big part of
this is trying to detect who's spamming us--or trying to trick
us into ranking their sites higher in our search results.
Our classification code gets deployed in the Content system,
which does the crawling and indexing to build search indexes
that we end up serving queries from. That's mainly for our
own group YST [Yahoo! Search Technology], which handles the
back end of web search, but we also provide data to other
groups, including Image Search.
My group also writes tools to interact with the Content system.
We can query it in all sorts of ways to find out what's happening
with particular sites or URLs. This is a challenge because
the Content system is very distributed and heterogeneous.
Read
the rest of this interview
China censors Google News
(November 30 2004) Interfax reports that Google's new service
has been inaccessible in China for more than a week.
Interfax
adds that the service is still available through the use
of proxy servers, a clear indication that it has been blocked
by the authorities.
The
Google news search engine and news aggregator gives Chinese
searchers access to uncensored news from all over the world,
something the Chinese dictatorship fears more than anything
else in the world.
In September Pandia reported on Google
giving in to Chinese authorities by excluding some sites
from the news listings presented to Chinese searchers. It
didn't help.
China's road towards internationalization and market based
capitalism makes the demand for freedom of speech stronger
and stronger. Indeed, other countries in the region that have
followed this path have ended up as democracies, including
Taiwan and South Korea.
The Chinese censorship is another clear indication of the
Internet's power as a political equalizer, meaning that search
engines like Google and Yahoo! are not only important tools
for knowledge diffusion, but for democratization as well.
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