A story floating around some science/computing journals right now is Orion. I don’t mean the ancient Greek god, I’m referring to a search engine in development at the University of New South Wales by PhD student Ori Allon. The Orion search engine is based on tightening searches even further by examining content that is STRONGLY related to the topic at hand.
Allon said Orion will complement existing search engines like Yahoo, MSN or Google. This engine will help weed out pages that are less important to searches and will help search engines improve relevancy, which is always needing refinement anyway. This engine will also help introduce other pages with relevant content too. It just doesn’t with the key words you typed in, it will also look for related topics that might contain valuable information as well.
PhysOrg quotes Andrew Stead of New South Innovations saying, “Bill Gates was recently quoted in Forbes magazine as saying that we need to take the search way beyond how people think of it today. We believe that Orion will do that.”
“The results to the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts, giving you the relevant information without having to go the website–although you still have that option if you wish,”
As many experts like Gates suggest the world of Internet search is changing dramatically, this could certainly be the direction of the future, putting relevance and content ahead of many other factors. While all search engines claim to be the most relevant, most watchers feel they have a long way to go. Orion just might be a step in that direction. Keep your eyes open. This might be one to watch for.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
