From: Alan Smeaton
1. I do not think you did justice to search engines by using only Boolean query examples and wildcards. Logs of WWW search engines show most people do not use Boolean operatives or wildcards but three or four keywords as a search. This natural language interface is much easier, especially for non computing people, to use than having to wrestle with Boolean logic.
2. Search engines generally compare themselves against this competition based on their coverage of WWW pages ("We have X million pages indexed" as the underlying power of the search engines are all about the same. Some advertise the computing power they have (Alta Vista for example) and the number of searches they have performed. Given this is so, then an approach which combines the coverage of eight or 10 of the other search engines by broadcasting a search request to each of the others and then combining their respective retrieved pages, has appeal. This is done in MetaCrawler from the University of Washington (http://www.metacrawler.com) and is the same approach as a project we have here in DCU (completion date mid summer, and our project was launched before MetaCarwler was announced).
3. The sophistication of the current search engines is not great because of the overhead of constantly trawling the Web for new pages or changes and indexing such a huge number of pages. As these problems are overcome we can expect search engines to introduce features like relevance feedback and automatic query expansion to improve not just their usability but also the quality of the results returned. Techniques developed for searching and retrieving from centralised document respositories, as we have been doing here at DCU for some years, will then start to appear in search engines.
From: Sean N Walsh
LOVED your article of March 25th, dealing with the Internet thanks.
There are, however, some stupid old culchies like me that have the misfortune of having to live in locations such as the (065) dialling area, from where Telecom Eireann and the Internet system providers are quite insistent that I will not be given local call access to the Internet for two different reasons. One, that Telecom Eireann likes me to pay more for trunk calls and, second, that no Internet provider has so far - seen fit to put a dial up facility in either Ennis or Shannon dialling areas.
Please Fiachra if we could get some recognition in somebody's article that such is so, as it is very hard to have to listen and read continually about what can be done with the Internet "for the price of a local call . . ."