DGLInfo: From IBM, A Better Searching Tool

IBM's Clever
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From IBM, A Better Searching Tool
by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

When IBM scientist Prabhakar Raghavan was planning a vacation to Thailand about a year ago, he did what many of us in the Internet age now do. He turned to the Internet, searching for Thailand and tourism.

But unlike everyone else who searches the Web using Internet directories and search engines such as Yahoo, Raghavan was not deluged with thousands of useless websites and pages on tourism in Thailand pitching mail-order brides.

Raghavan and his colleagues at IBM's Almaden Research Center are developing a new algorithm they've called "Clever." Rather than returning hundreds of thousands of pages on Thailand's tourism, the Clever program returned only about 30 webpages on Thailand and tourism, a number that's small enough to be reviewed by a human.

The web is estimated to contain more than 270,000,000 documents. This sounds big already, and it's growing by over a 1,000,000 documents a day.

We're overloaded with data. It's virtually impossible to find specific information quickly any more. With the major search engines cataloging so many pages, most users find it a humbling experience when they attempt to narrowly search the net. We're not able to turn data into information as quickly as necessary.

Clever lets users find the most relevant information by analyzing both the hyperlinks in webpages and the words surrounding the links.

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updated September 21, 1998
http://dgl.com/dglinfo/1998/dg980921.html