shirley niemans

Society of the Query conference: 13 - 14 November, Trouw Amsterdam in Amsterdam
With the Society of the Query conference -stop searching, start questioning-, the Institute of Network Cultures aims to critically reflect on the information society and the dominant role of the search engine in our culture. What does the dependency on the engine to manage the complex system of knowledge on the Internet mean? What alternatives exist? How can the increasingly centralized web be regulated? What is the future of interface design? By bringing together researchers, theorists and artists, the conference will examine the key issues that are emerging around web search, and contextualize developments within the fields of knowledge organization and information design.

Introduction
Search is the way we now live. At present, the reality of the information society is one in which we are increasingly confined to the use of information retrieval tools to create order and value in the vast amount of online data. Web search has taken over from (directory based) browsing and surfing as the dominant activity on the web. With this development, the search engine has become the main point of reference, one whose emphasis on efficiency and service tends to cloud the nature of both the underlying technology and (corporate) ideologies.

In what might be dubbed the ‘society of the query’, this conference asks what this dependency on tools to manage the complex system of knowledge on the Internet means for our culture. As the idea of a semantic web unfolds, the human versus artificial intelligence controversy is regarded with renewed urgency. The increasingly centralized computing grid invites critical questions about power distribution, governance, and diversity and accessibility of web content, while on the other hand promising alternatives to the dominant paradigm arise in P2P and open source initiatives. With large investments in media literacy, what role might politics and education play in establishing an informed and technologically literate user base?

This two-day Query conference aims to examine the key issues that are emerging around web search, and to contextualize developments within the fields of knowledge organization and information design. The Institute of Network Cultures aims to do so specifically by bringing together researchers, theorists and artists, creating room for speculation and open questions, as well as concrete projects and research. Continue reading…

Last Saturday, November 8, I had the pleasure of attending the well organized World-Information Institute conference Deep Search: The Digital Future of Finding Out in Vienna, Austria. With Deep Search, conference editors Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder set out to address the social and cultural dimension as well as the information politics and societal implications of search. An impressive line-up of eight speakers, divided over the sessions ‘Search Engines and Civil Liberties’, ‘Search Engines and Power’ and ‘Making Things Visible’, promised to make it an information-dense and interesting day.

As this will be a rather full report, I will post it in two parts. Be sure to keep an eye on the conference website, as the organizers promise to make a full video archive of the conference speeches available soon.

Keynotes

Paul Duguid - The World According to Grep: Both Sides of the Search Revolution

After a timely start and a word of welcome, Konrad Becker introduced the first speaker of the event: Paul Duguid, former consultant at Xerox PARC (1989-2001) and author of The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). Currently, Duguid teaches History of Information and Quality of Information at the University of California in Berkeley.

Continue reading…

Search Engine Society is the name of Alex Halavais‘ forthcoming book, due to be published by Polity in October 2008, as part of the Digital Media and Society series. Halavais is assistant professor of interactive communications at Quinnipiac University (USA), a ’social architect’, and blogs about politics, culture, teaching and research at a thaumaturgical compendium. With his book, Halavais aims to unpack the black box of the search engine, in order to counter a host of assumptions underlying both technological developments and the way we use search engines to make sense of the networked world.

Approaching search from a user perspective, Halavais notes that the diversity of searching skills represents yet another level of the digital divide as even the most basic search is a complicated action. Where students tend to ‘shop’ sites such as Wikipedia or IMDB before turning to the search engine, experienced users engage in a more ‘focused browsing’; carefully circling concepts while extracting, recording and recombining data until results are met. Reaching those parts of the web that aren’t easily indexed however, requires yet alternative strategies.

Search based on re-finding information have become a recent interest to researchers. Making use of the remembering web, for instance through bookmarking sites such as delicious, re-finding may become a profitable search strategy. Much the same goes for real-time search, the process of re-using those searches that have proved to work in the past. In this line of ‘query-free search’, an engine may provide ways to find conceptual similarities to previously found pages or documents. As users gain experience, searching tends to become more complex. Most general-purpose search engines seem ill equipped to meet this diversity of needs, often building on traditional methods. Another pressing problem in determining a search strategy is the engine’s constant updating of ranking algorithms, causing a state of flux that is all but transparent.

Continue reading…

The vertical search phenomenon has been on the rise for several years. As opposed to the ‘horizontal’, general purpose search engines such as Google, Ask.com and MS LiveSearch, vertical engines index only a specialized part of the Web. As the elaborate ‘verticals’ category at altsearchengines.com shows, recent developments are many, including engines such as Wellsphere, searching consumer health sites, BackType for finding and sharing comments and Loo2Go, the German engine that finds you the nearest public toilet. Better known examples are A9’s e-commerce search, local search engines and media type or content-related engines like Polar Rose or JobSearch.

Building on the idea that a search engine might best be developed within the context of the specific content that is offered, there have been several developments on the query side as well. OpenSearch, developed by Amazon sponsored A9, has become the standard format for search engine description documents since Firefox 2 and IE 7. The description documents tell the browser how to ‘call upon’ a search engine, defining the properties of the search box and engine on your site, such as the database it should use when suggesting search terms to your users. Any website with a search option can offer its results in the OpenSearch format, allowing for the syndication of results with those of other sites, by aggregators or meta-search engines.

One of the latest search-related initiatives is Briteclick, a start-up company that presented its tool (not an engine) at the TechCrunch50 conference just yesterday. Its main feature is the way it allows for sidebar information to become available in just one click on a keyword (hence ‘briteclicking’), without having to leave the page you are on. For instance, when using mail, one could highlight and right-click the word ‘Merlot’, choose ‘Briteclick’, and the sidebar will display a module allowing one to search a large wine database. Briteclick is set up as a free and easy to install platform that lets vertical search engines create a Briteclick module that will be displayed in the sidebar during a relevant search. With this tool, Briteclick claims to have developed an application that “simplifies the way people search and complete tasks on the web”. Unfortunately, Briteclick is not publicly available as of yet, beta testing is possible by invitation only.