Kerry and all,
This indeed and interesting article on IBM's "Clever" search engine
technology. I find it very limiting and to some degree misrepresenting
of information on the net myself, not to mention not very transitional
from an internet search engine technology standpoint. Other less known
search engine technologies of this nature that also have much MORE
flexibility are very similar in most ways as IBM's "Clever". But I am
sure
if IBM ever gets their marketing bunch cranked up, they will find some
suckers for this.
The downside I find for "Clever" is that it leads people doing net
searches
to those sites that are accessed "Hit" the most dubbing them the most
"Authoritative", which is pure YADDA. For instance, I am quite sure that
is some doctor is looking for research on Cancer, they would find the
National Cancer research center as the most accessed or "Hit" site
on that search query word. Yet that is likely not even in the top ten
most current Cancer research sites on the net, but IS the most frequently
"Hit" site. Hardly "Authoritative", especially in all areas of Cancer
research.
This would tend to attempt to relegate other "More Authoritative"
research
centers on Cancer to a second class position if one is using "Clever"
as their primary search engine. So, imagine if you will what it
could/would
do for those small and medium size businesses that compete with IBM
and other big software/network/internet companies of all sorts.
A more balanced article on this IBM search engine technology
can be found here:
http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/16494.html
Kerry Miller wrote:
> not quite the same idea, but close!
>
> ===
> http://www.cnnfn.com/digitaljam/newsbytes/130617.html
>
> WWW Conference - IBM Search Engine "Trawls" Web
> May 13, 1999: 3:37 p.m. ET
>
> TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA (NB) -- By Grant Buckler,
> Newsbytes. If three separate World Wide Web pages contain
> hyperlinks to three other sites, something is going on. That
> principle underlies Clever, search technology developed by IBM
> [NYSE:IBM] researchers that might offer a better way of locating
> information on the Web. Clever brought the research team - Ravi
> Kumar, Prabhakar Raghavan, Sridhar Rajagopalan, and Andrew
> Tomkins - the distinction of best paper at this year's World Wide
> Web Conference, taking place here this week.
>
> Entitled "Trawling the Web for Emerging Cyber Communities," the
> paper describes an approach that uses patterns of
> interconnections among Web sites to discover communities that
> one might not expect. It can also locate information in ways a
> conventional search engine would not.
>
> In an interview with Newsbytes, Raghavan said a good deal of
> research went into choosing the number three as the critical point.
> One page pointing to two other sites usually does not indicate any
> important connection among the three sites, he said. Even two
> pointing to two is not significant enough. But when three sites all
> point to three other sites, and the links are not what Raghavan
> called nepotistic - that is, there is an obvious link among the pages
> such as the fact that they are part of the same organization's Web
> site - it is about 95 percent certain that there is something
> meaningful in common.
>
> One use of this principle could be in discovering unexpected
> communities on the Web. That could have applications to
> marketing, among other things, Raghavan said.
>
> Another application is finding sites that meet certain criteria but
> that might not be easy to find with the conventional text-searching
> approach. An example might be an analyst who wants information
> about mainframe computers. IBM is one of the major
> manufacturers of mainframe computers, and yet, Raghavan said, if
> you look at IBM's Web site you will not find the word "mainframe."
> Because the word is out of fashion, vendors use others such as
> "server." So a conventional search on the word "mainframe" might
> miss a lot of the most useful material.
>
> However, there are on the Web many of what Raghavan called "hub
> sites," often created by people interested in a particular topic.
> Such a site dealing with mainframes might point to IBM's site as
> well as those of Fujitsu and Hitachi. A Clever search would pick up
> on the fact that sites pointing to one of these companies' sites also
> tend to point to the others, and would discern a community. Given
> a term such as "mainframe" or the names IBM and Hitachi, say, it
> would find mainframe-related sites including the vendors' home
> pages, even though those pages don't actually contain the word
> "mainframe."
>
> Raghavan said IBM sees Clever not as a general-purpose
> consumer search engine but as a tool for more sophisticated
> searchers. It is currently in pilot use within IBM, and the company
> will move quickly to bring it to market, possibly by working with one
> or more marketing partners, he said.
>
> More information on Clever is available through
> Raghavan's Web page at
> http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/k53/clever.html .
>
> ===
Regards,
--
Jeffrey A. Williams
CEO/DIR. Internet Network Eng/SR. Java/CORBA Development Eng.
Information Network Eng. Group. INEG. INC.
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Contact Number: 972-447-1894
Address: 5 East Kirkwood Blvd. Grapevine Texas 75208
