UMIACS Computational Linguistics Colloquium Series,
September 11, 1997
UMIACS Computational Linguistics Colloquium Series,
September 11, 1997
Beyond Search Engines
William A. Woods
Sun Microsystems Laboratories
In the beginning, browsing the web was like a game
of Adventure, exploring a maze of "twisty little
passages," from web page to web page, looking for
what you need and trying to remember where you saw
something useful. Now, web crawlers and search
engines have changed the equation. By typing a
single request, you can be directly connected to
web pages containing exactly the words you asked for.
So why isn't everybody happily finding what they need?
This talk will describe the state of the art, some
things that can go wrong, some of the ways different
search engines can differ, and some new technology
that will change the way you think about text search.
Return to the UMD
Computational Linguistics Colloquium Series.