2009 February | Reviews Fan

Currently, search engines analayze users’ search terms to decide how to apply the query to a particular database. For example, if a user searches “Obama” the search engine needs to know which types of sites — news sites, government sites, campaign sites — are likely to contain information about Obama and also what kinds of inquiries the database will accept. New technology, such as DeepPeep and Google’s innovations, will aim to eventually index every database on the public web to better analyze search results and predict the usefulness of the site. If the search engine finds a page with a form related to news, it will start guessing likely search terms — Obama, Afghanistan, Stock Market — until a term returns a match, and then the search engine will analyze the results to develop a predictive model of what the database contains. In this way the search engine should be more familiar with every site on the web and, therefore, more equipped to accurately apply search queries. As Lapointe points out, it will benefit news sites to follow and understand these new technologies as they develop in order to, once again, optimize search engines to generate maximum web exposure.

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