Technology and market of personality search

Author: Zhang Zhenghua

In February 2003, Google acquired one of the world's largest blogging services, Blogger.com's provider Pyra labs;2003 September, when Google acquired a new enterprise that made personalized and contextual search tools for kaltix;2003 years, October, Google bought the online advertising network company sprinks;2004 July, Google announced the acquisition of Picasa Digital photo management manufacturer in California; in October 2004, Google acquired the california-based Digital map service keyhole;2004 December, Google has announced an agreement with the world's leading research library and Oxford University to begin transferring its search content to digital files ... These are just the prelude to Google's introduction of personalized search.

Now that Google's share price has soared to $197.60 trillion, and the company's market capitalisation has reached $54.027 billion trillion (as of December 31, 2004), the market has seen good expectations for Google. Google's preference for personalized search technology, however, seems to herald a further miracle in the search engine arena for personalized search.

new Battlefield of search technology

"Personalization" is often a magic weapon for many businesses, it is always able to create a myth, and this rule for search engine enterprises also apply. Search engines have changed the way we use the Internet, and even formed a "search-style" usage, but that's far from enough. Search personalized storm is coming, users not only need to be able to search the information of the search engine, they want to do the owner of information consumption, so that the search engine to "I" as the center, rather than "I" to the search engine as the center.

But the present situation is, in front of the search engine, each kind of user has no choice. For individual users, search engine service providers display what kind of information content, what kind of search results, what kind of access equipment, the individual has no right to choose, for enterprise customers, employees can not effectively get the specific information to adapt to business needs, In particular, the integration of internal knowledge and information resources and Internet Information resources personalized information; For advertisers, the combination of high-quality, directional, traceable information is submerged in the miscellaneous of information, and for the Web site, can not control the search engine to provide a suitable site characteristics of information sources, can only choose thousands of people side, The same search results, because the initiative to provide search services monopoly in the hands of the domineering search engine giants ...

But search giants have realised that search engine personalization is the main way to retain users outside of brand loyalty, and personalized search will become a new battleground for search technology, with Microsoft, Yahoo and Google developing personalized search engine technology to attract users.

intelligent "web Spider"

Personalized search applications need advanced concepts and excellent technical support, in order to win the user's praise. The focus of search engine technology is to enhance the user's experience: fine, quasi, full and fast. Search speed is the search technology and service providers entered the ticket, there will be no problem, but "fine, quasi, full" is not a personalized and related. Web Spider personalization has a significant impact on search engine recall and registration, it determines the size of the search engine data capacity, and the quality of web spiders will directly affect the search information resource database.

Web spiders are crawling reptiles on the Internet, it uses the link address of the Web page to find the page, starting from a page (usually the homepage) of a website, reading the content of the Web page, finding the other link address in the page, and then looking for the next page through the link address, so that the cycle continues, Until all the pages of this site have been crawled. If the entire Internet as a Web site, then the Web spider can use this principle of the Internet all the pages are crawled down.

At present, the spider is basically blind spider, based on a few simple several rules crawling, never know where to go, will only aimlessly crawl miscellaneous information, processing the Internet surface information, very diligent but no personality. The personalized search engine requires intelligent web spiders, with direction, purposeful, and planning to crawl information, while shouldering the task of finding, discovering, locating and submitting information that meets the requirements. It can not only automatically and spontaneously manage itself, but also can perceive its own environment and respond, not only have professional knowledge, but also have learning ability, the processing of information not only has breadth, but also has depth, not only preprocessing also have post processing.

Intelligent Web spider crawling, search engine personalization, want to solve the most fundamental problem is to allow users to DIY out of a unique search engine. And the real personalized search to be able to do the information type of personalization, information content personalization, information equipment Personalization and the dynamic search process.

Demand Technology Dual Day

Although personalized search engine fresh out of the attention of many users, but the current search engine technology and the user's expectations far, it is not intelligent understanding of human ideas, and human life fully integrated. The foresight of demand and the lag of technology are twins in any field, and how to find the balance between them is a problem we have to face. At present, personalized search engine faces a lot of technical challenges:

Semantic-based multimedia search technology is not mature, such as the search for images can only be judged by the surrounding text, and can not be based on the image itself to provide the information retrieval.

Search engine keyword is easy to enter only one or less, the search engine can not understand the user's real search requirements, so can only arrange all kinds of results. The automatic clustering technology has made some attempts to deal with this problem, but it has not brought about much improvement.

As more resources and useful information on the network exists in the form of a database, and search engine spiders in the process of crawling these dynamic Web site is very easy to fall into the dead cycle, many search engines have to limit the depth, which makes the search engine can not reach the amount of data in the total network data volume of 30%.

Search engines still need to rely on browsers as a vehicle to provide retrieval services, which greatly limits the scope of search engine personalization. Although Google has started testing wireless shopping search services, and cable technology is also beginning to provide mobile phones to search for goods and coupons delivery services, but there are many work to be done.

difference creates value

The future of personalized search technology will be the user's subjective initiative to the point of the culmination. The biggest difference with other services is that the search service is entirely out of the user's subjective will, when the characteristics of the second phase of the Internet from passive "attention" to the active "search power", the Chinese and foreign search technology providers have unique business model and enterprise strategy will have to revolve around this highly subjective technology.

No matter how competitive the business is and how business works, the key point is that only "difference" can create value and technology is one of the key outlets. The personalization of the surface does not represent the whole of technology, including blogs, news aggregators, emails and instant messages, this is just a welcome change in the search field of personalized awareness, in-depth issues need to be carefully grinding industry experts, eventually someone will introduce new technology or search tools to recreate the way of information return, It's just a matter of time.

But can not ignore the fact that many of the once-scenic search engine gradually fade out of sight, the process, the importance of technology is greatly highlighted, so most market participants all pay attention to search technology research and development input, in order to be able to take advantage in the future market development, Unrealistic hype and exaggeration can only lead to enterprises lose their own direction of development.