WIRED 4.05: Seek and Ye Shall Find

[Molly Molloy]

http://www.hotwired.com/wired/4.05/indexing/index.html

provides excerpts from an article about the "ultimate index" in the May
issue of WIRED by Steve Steinberg.  The author interviews various search
engine and catalog developers (yahoo, excite, inktomi, etc) about their
strategies and visions of the future.  He says some not very intelligent
things about librarians and seems to think that all human knowledge will
be on the web any day now.  He doesn't take into account much about
economics/politics/copyright or other social issues. I'd be interested in
opinions of some of the more technical info-retrieval folks on this list. 

Molly Molloy, New Mexico State University Library
mmolloy at lib.nmsu.edu

EXCERPT below:  
>                 Seek and Ye Shall Find
> 
>                 As the Web eventually grows to
>                 encompass all of human
>                 knowledge, it's clear we're
>                 going to need powerful tools
>                 to make sense of it all. It's
>                 not just a matter of software.
>                 We need to understand how
>                 people think.
> 
>                 Author Steve G. Steinberg on
>                 indexing the Web:
> 
>                 "One afternoon, back in high
>                 school, I looked through the
>                 modem settings for a computer
>                 at a nearby college and found
>                 the password to the
>                 Lexis-Nexis database. I
>                 quickly wrote it down in my
>                 notebook for later perusal
>                 from home. That night, it
>                 seemed as if all useful
>                 knowledge was at my fingertips
>                 - I could search through a
>                 decade of newspaper and
>                 magazine articles. I could
>                 find any fact, resolve any
>                 argument. On the downside, I
>                 became completely
>                 insufferable, always citing
>                 facts and figures to anyone
>                 who would listen.
>                 [Jerry Yang, David Filo, and Srinija Srinivasan]
>                 Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang, David
>                 Filo and Srinija Srinivasan -
>                 On a quest to classify the
>                 Web.
> 
>                 "Fortunately, the password
>                 soon died, but it left me
>                 impressed with how useful
>                 huge, searchable databases can
>                 be. I found myself remembering
>                 this episode whenever I
>                 searched the Web using tools
>                 like Alta Vista or Lycos. I
>                 started to wonder what the
>                 limits were: Will the Web one
>                 day truly contain all
>                 knowledge, just as I once
>                 imagined Nexis did? Will the
>                 Web become too large and
>                 chaotic to search, or will new
>                 technology be developed that
>                 allows people to easily find
>                 exactly what they're looking
>                 for?
> 
>                 "To find the answers, I
>                 started talking to some of the
>                 scientists and engineers who
>                 were working in the areas of
>                 knowledge organization and
>                 information retrieval.
>                 Strangely enough, that turned
>                 out to mean talking to some of
>                 my old computer science
>                 professors. Before coming to
>                 Wired, I had been a computer
>                 science grad student at UC
>                 Berkeley, and I now found that
>                 many of the hot Web-search
>                 tools were coming from that
>                 community. Inktomi was
>                 developed by a Berkeley
>                 professor and a student,
>                 Architext was founded by a
>                 bunch of CS undergrads at
>                 Stanford, and Yahoo! was
>                 created by two CS grad
>                 dropouts.
> 
>                 "I think my familiarity with
>                 computer science let me see
>                 through a lot of hype that
>                 these guys emit. I could call
>                 them on their bullshit. At the
>                 same time, I became convinced
>                 that some of these people have
>                 developed amazing techniques
>                 for bringing order to Web
>                 chaos. I think they've made
>                 real strides that will allow
>                 the Web to be automatically
>                 sorted and classified, even
>                 when it's 100 terrabytes of
>                 text. What I'm not sure about
>                 is how this technology will
>                 end up being used. Hopefully,
>                 it won't just lead to a lot of
>                 kids quoting figures like I
>                 once did."
> 
>                 What do you think? Is it
>                 possible to make a coherent
>                 index of the constantly
>                 growing World Wide Web? Talk
>                 about it in Threads.
> 
> 
>      Full Text Available May 20, 1996.
>      Copyright © 1996 Wired Ventures Ltd.
> 
>      All rights reserved.