Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
Today s podcast is a continuation of the coverage of the WWW2008 event in Beijing. For day three of the event, I sat in on the Microsoft Keynote presented by Dr. Harry Shum, Corporate Vice President.
The title of the Dr. Shum s keynote was “Taking Search to New Frontiers” and the abstract went something like this:
Today s search engines not only have become one of the most important services on the Web but are also driving the development of next generation computing platform for the global Internet economy. In addition to connecting people to information at the speed of light with the use of automatic algorithms, search technologies are also revolutionizing many other aspects of people’s lives, including shopping, commerce, entertainment, travel, health care, and social activities.
Dr. Harry Shum first introduced Microsoft s latest research and product development efforts toward building an infrastructure for webscale data management and data analysis to better structure the Web. He also talked about how MS will take Web search further into these new frontiers and how our efforts will empower people to do things that were not possible before.
Special thanks to Professor Mark DuBois for the following notes from the Microsoft keynote:
•Search is still at its infancy
•Search is not a battle it?’s a war
•Current search engines took advantage of keywords today pushing boundary of keyword model
•Phenomenon explosive growth of content more and more user generated content, also multimedia content (challenging few words), unprecedented challenge in scale
•Web becoming dynamic, interactive place for users social networking people want to interact
•Long way to go 40% unanswered queries, 50% require refinement for searches
•Need to understand semantics this is right way to go. How can this be extracted
The crowd was introduced to a video search demo that MS research Asia been heading up. Although China s firewall posed some challenges the results looked pretty amazing.
Also, MS is working on a research project entitled Guanxi. The demo was all about relationships people oriented search. How we are related to other people and organizations and locations and skills. Who I am is contained in these relationships. For additional details, I shot a couple of minutes of video and audio, check them out in a raw and unedited format at the WOW Tech Minute http://www.webprominute.org
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