A last note about the morning sessions. Mike Moran of IBM has put his talk, "Don't just change the search engine (powerpoint)" on his blog.
The afternoon sessions turned out to be less interesing and useful to me than I had hoped except for a couple of talks.
The first talk was by Claude Vogel of Convera. Convera, formely Excalibur, has been providing enterprise class search for many year now and their products have matured well over that time. Claude spoke about speeding search using faceting, and as later speaker defined it, "a facet is a certain classifiable characteristic of the resource -- a way to classify something." To me the talk seemed more of a marketing speech for their product Excalibur which is not surprising.
Next up was Abe Lederman of Deep Web Technologies who spoke of challenges in scaling federated (metasearch) searches. He characterized the challenges in searching thousands of sources as follows:
- Determining the sources to search
- Retrieving searches from cache and how often to update the cache
- Performing many searches in parallel
- The need to bring the best documents back
And of course how to rank the results. He touched upon the methods they used including;
- Multi-user Relevance Ranking which includes QuickRank - occurence of search terms, MetaRank - custom algorithm applied to metadata, DeepRank - indexing fulltext documents
- User-driven Ranking
- Clustering
He spoke of a large project they recently completed for the government called Science.gov FirstGov for Science. He also spoke of another project they are working on that is supposedely trying to index and provide a search of "all science information available from one place".
The next talk was by Tom Reamy of the KAPS group and his talk "Facetted Navigation: An Alternative to Search and Browse" dealt primarily with explaining facet navigation and its potential. He showed an online demo at facetmap.com which provides a good introduction.
Next up was Peter Noerr of MuseGlobal who provided an overview of metasearch, his talk was titled "The Hidden Side of the Metasearch World".
The next three talks dealt with mining, as in text mining. Pete Cipollone of Factiva, one of the largest providers of news and business information, was the first to speak. His talk "Visualizing emerging intelligence through text mining" was somewhat interesting but seemed more like a marketing speech.
The next two talks by Pascal Coupet of TEMIS and Laurent Proulx of Nstein Technologies dealt with searching in context, challenges metadata etc. I was not particularly captivated by these talks.
That was it it for the first day. A lot to absorb but I did come away with some new ideas and better understanding of where we are today with search.