The Software Abstractions Blog

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Today, we reach a milestone - this is the 100th post on this blog!

I want to thank you, the readers of this blog - you make it all possible. In order to serve you better in the future, we've created a short survey to learn about your preferences and to get your feedback about this blog.

Please take our 2-minute user survey and help us improve this blog. You could win a $25 Gift Certificate on Amazon!*

Click here to go to User Survey 2008

If you would like to connect with me, please feel free to email me directly, follow me on twitter or friend me on Facebook. I have had some terrific interactions with readers who have connected with me after reading an article they particularly agreed or disagreed with; I always learn a lot from all of these interactions.

Finally, if you're interested in writing a guest post on this blog that would be of interest to readers, please email me directly.

Thank you for your participation in the Software Abstractions community!

*Winner will be selected by random drawing from among all of the survey participants, after the survey is closed. Winner will be notified by email, and with their permission, highlighted on this blog.

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Web Poll Results: Killer App for Semantic Web technology

Our recent web poll asked readers to vote on what they saw as the most likely "killer app" for Semantic Web technology, from a variety of choices. A total of 51 readers voted - thank you! The results of the poll are shown below.

    

What is the most likely *Killer App* for Semantic Web technology?

Within this results set, users felt that Web Search was the most promising application of Semantic Web. This seems reasonable - being able to extract the meaning of web pages should help search engines match results better with specific queries. On the other hand, this blog focuses extensively on web search, so the demographics of the audience may be skewed, thus affecting the results.

More interesting is that readers felt that Enterprise Applications are more likely to benefit from semantic analysis, over vertical applications. This is curious because semantic analysis is easier and more effective within a given vertical domain, where some level of background knowledge can be assumed by the parsing algorithms.

Also, Social Applications got only one vote - but as Facebook's Aditya Agarwal noted in a recent SDForum meet, the problem of finding relevant content of interest for a given user from within their social group is actually very similar to the basic problem of web search. So those two choices are not as different as one might think.

Finally, several users chose the "other" option, and listed their own interesting choices:

• gnodal    [??]
• contextual search
• Actually, semantics is not about a particular application but a way of expressing
• All: Integration of search with social networking and other apps
• portal and service interoperability

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Web Poll Results: What is the Most Important Component of a Search Engine?

Our last web poll had asked readers to vote on what they considered to be the most important component of a Search Engine - an indication of the areas a small search startup should focus on to help capture market share away from the major search engines.

27 readers voted (thank you!). The poll results are shown below.

These results are interesting because I had expected a higher percentage of votes for the Results Visualization choice, followed by the Algorithm choice, but the votes did not match my expectations. Part of the reason could be that readers of this blog are predisposed to have a stronger interest in the algorithms and strategies used by various search engines than in their UI paradigms.

As for the size of the Content Index, that's a metric that is slowly declining in importance. There was a time when the major search engines would fall all over themselves in trying to top each other in terms of the amount of data indexed; but as the content on the web explodes and grows progressively richer, it simply does not matter as much, and that is reflected by the votes.

As expected, the Query Spec choice got completely ignored. The search engine input spec could be so much richer than a minimal number of words or a single phrase. However, I fear that we're condemned to using keyword-ese for specifying our needs to the Search Engine for the long-term future, which is a pity; like the QWERTY keyboard, it may stick with us well after its usefulness has waned.

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Web Poll: What is the *Killer App* for Semantic Web technology?

I recently wrote an article describing working product demos for Semantic Web applications:  The Semantic Web is becoming real - slowly   . For our latest Web Poll, I would like to ask readers their opinion on this topic.

Which of the following do you see as the most likely Killer App for Semantic Web technology - the one that truly puts it on the map?

• Internet Search (a la Powerset )
• Enterprise applications - Supply Chain, Sales Force Automation, et al
• Social Networking (a la twine )
• Verticals - Travel, Finance, and the like
• None; this technology is not real anyway!
• Other: something else?
   

The web poll appears in the left side bar. Please vote and let us know what you think!

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Many thanks to everyone who voted in our previous poll about the most important component of a Search Engine. Check back next week to see the final scores.

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Survey: What's the most important component of a Search Engine?

This is an argument that's been going on among search bloggers - what's more important, the Results Visualization UI or the core Algorithm? Which one should a small search engine startup focus on, to help capture market share away from the mainstream search engines?

The latest Software Abstractions survey (in the left sidebar) asks this question. Do you have a strong opinion? Vote now and let us know!

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Survey Results: The Future of Web Search

Thank you to everyone who participated in the last Software Abstractions survey! We asked: which features do you see as the most important ones for Web Search in the future? The results were interesting.

Out of a total of 33 votes, the top votes were closely split between a variety of answers.

• Personalization  [6 votes]
• Social Input  [5 votes]
• Semantic Query  [5 votes]
• Semantic Index  [6 votes]
• Trusted Sources  [6 votes]

For search engines with advanced linguistic parsing capabilities, it's reasonable to assume that semantic processing will be applied to both the query and to the indexed content as a whole. If you combine those two answers, then Semantic Processing is the clear winner with 33% of the votes!

The high number of votes for the "Trusted Sources" answer was a surprise - it's clear that a stronger focus on quality of the results in the future (and their being spam-free) weighs heavily on users.

The complete picture of results is given below:

 

 

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Survey: The Future of Web Search

In this latest poll on the Software Abstractions blog, we would like to ask readers about the Future of Search .

Specifically, which features do you see as the most important ones for Web Search in the future? Vote now and let us know!

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Update: This survey is now closed. You can view the results of the survey here.

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Coming Soon: Software Abstractions Surveys

I'm planning to introduce polls periodically into upcoming posts on this blog. As a test - call it Survey 0 - I've created the multiple-selection survey below.

The results of this survey will be used to provide more content of interest to you, the reader of this blog; so you might as well take 2 seconds and vote!

A future post will comment on the results of this survey.

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