Monday, February 02, 2004

Content-aware search. At InfoWorld's 2002 CTO Forum, Google co-founder Sergey Brin threw cold water on the idea of instrumenting content for intelligent search. "I'd rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write," he said, "than by forcing humans to write in ways that computers can understand." Brin's pragmatic stance sharply opposes the idealistic view of the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, who continues to evangelize his vision of a Semantic Web full of carefully encoded content that we can precisely search and fluidly recombine. My own humble contribution to this debate is a prototype search engine, now running on my Weblog, that tries to steer a middle course between the Scylla of simple fulltext search and the Charybdis of unwieldy tagging schemes and brittle ontologies. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] I keep trying out phrases to capture what I'm aiming for. One is 'dynamic categories,' another is 'interoperable content.' Probably neither will stick, because these only describe how to do something, not why. The why, of course, is productivity. ... [Jon's Radio] 3:43:48 PM    Trackback []

Technology and Worker Efficiency. Researchers seem confident that technology has made American workers more efficient. Now some think they even know why. By Steve Lohr. [New York Times: Technology] 11:39:41 AM    Trackback []