Xerox Corp announced on Wednesday that it has developed a new search engine facility called FactSpotter. Known as a semantic search engine, FactSpotter is one of a new breed of search engines - one which many people believe represent the next generation of search, taking over from the likes of Google, Yahoo! and MSN.A semantic search engine works in a different way to a conventional modern search engine. When looking at a web page, a conventional search engine looks for the distribution of words within the web page to try and find how relevant it is to the user's search query. Basically, this means that a web page with similar words to those the user types into a search engine will be thought to be more relevant, and will appear at a higher position in the search results page.
A semantic search engine takes this idea and expands it. The semantic search engine is designed to try and understand the context that the words are used within the web page to try and match it more accurately to the user's search query. Examples of this can be seen when the semantic search engine recognises every occurrence of 'she' in a document about Jade Goody, say, as being equivalent to the words 'Jade Goody' in the document; or where the search engine will recognise the difference between pages that use the word "pupil" to mean "student", and pages that use the word "pupil" to refer to the aperture at the front of the eye.
The expected end result of this research is hoped to be the development of a search engine that will find results that are just as relevant as those that would be returned if a human being took your search query and looked through every one of the pages that have been collected by the search engine, in order to try and find the best search results for you - or if you rather, a search engine that looks at web pages in exactly the same way as a human brain does.
Initially FactSpotter will be used by lawyers and corporate litigation departments, to look through the thousands upon thousands of pages of legal documents that these professionals will need quick access to. Conventional search technology has had limited success in this area, as the language used through the legal documents is very similar and ambiguous, making it hard to spot the difference between documents.
This is not the only development in the field of semantic search: there are many other semantic search engines such as Hakia.com and various promising academic projects. There are also examples that show that Google has started to adapt semantic technologies into its search results. It is clear that semantic searches are the way that things are progressing in the world of search engines - the 'next big thing', if you will - and it's encouraging to see the amount of work that's being done in this field.
