Odysseus

Title: Web Search. Shared

Speaker:  Prof Barry Smyth - CLARITY/CASL/School of Computer Science
and Informatics, UCD – Profile

Date & Time: Thursday, July 24th 2008, 4.00pm - 5.00pm

Venue: UCD CASL Seminar Room, Ground Floor, CASL.

Abstract
Today's leading search engines respond to billions of queries a week,
helping hundreds of millions of users everyday. Indeed for many of us
the search engine is probably the single most important information
tool that we use on a regular basis. And search engines make a very
significant contribution to the economic fabric of the Internet. All
is well with Web search, or so it appears. Unfortunately, this is not
true. About 50% of search queries fail to lead to result selections,
let alone answers, for searchers. Many of us find ourselves wasting
time trying to re-find information that we have previously located
during past searches. Novices, in particular, find search to be a
daunting prospect, often stumbling when it comes to formulating a
query to begin their search.

This talk has two parts: a research part and a commercialisation part.
To begin we will discuss how these shortcomings can be addressed by a
fresh look at web search. Our starting point is the solitary nature of
web search; when we search, we do so in isolation, and the Google's of
this world are fundamentally single-user services. Consequently, we
explore what happens when traditional web search engines like Google
are made more collaborative, by allowing groups and communities of
searchers to share in the searches of others. We show how this can
significantly improve the quality of web search for all.

In the second part of this talk we will describe a new venture that has evolved from this research in CASL. We will be launching an alpha release of the new HeyStaks system, which provides toolbar-based access to this type of collaborative search service. We describe the basic operation of HeyStaks, paying particular attention to how this type of research can potentially support the unique multi-disciplinary research that is ongoing in CASL.