Throw the Advertising Out of the Search Engines by Phillip Sheu Ph.D.

   One of the unexpected negatives of living in the “Information Age” is the continual onslaught of both random and targeted information.  Everyday we are bombarded with more electronic impressions than we can adequately process. Some of the information falls cleanly into usable and unusable piles. More often, we get caught with interesting but not urgent info we attempt to place in a holding bin.
    When we seek information, we turn to search engines that produce results that range from dead-on to mystifying. Often a result of a search contains high-level entries not in the least tied to what we’re looking for. As we scan over these entries, an impression is made in our minds. Other entries perhaps more relevant are pushed to subsequent pages. Human nature being what it is, we rarely explore beyond the first page of search results.
    Have you ever wondered how those results are filtered? What causes an entry to make it to the top? Much of it comes from a complicated process known as search engine optimization (SEO).  If you have a website and want to be found during searches, you optimize your site. A well optimized website has determined a list of keywords and phrases thought to be common to most persons’ search criteria. Services can be hired to optimize your website forcing your listing to a higher position when a relevant search is initiated. Companies offering commercial services related to your search will be prominently listed on the search page – sometimes looking remarkably authentic. They obtain these primo locations after paying a fee to the owner of the search site. In short, they advertise.
    Does advertising create a bias in the search results? You bet it does. I recently did a simple search – “best dive watch” and the results were typical to what I expected.
    The first three were from watch manufacturers or watch dealers; the fourth entry represented an article in Forbes magazine contrasting features and prices on a selection of dive watches.  Note my search didn’t ask “where” could I buy a dive watch; I was looking for information similar to that contained in the Forbes article.
    Why is it not possible to just access the data I want without being hit with a sales pitch? Well, it is possible.
    Using organic search, a new search management system finds responses based on answers deemed relevant by other searchers. These searchers have rated the response to their requests to create a statistically relevant ranking.  Thanks to your peers, the answers you receive are not influenced by advertising dollars. 
    As searchers, we can now be more concerned with the content around the search – what has been searched, what has been found, how were the results found, how useful are the results, and how are the results best used. Queries such as “Find causes of lung cancers” should result in a list of “causes” not a list of links that require further work from the user. This logic is at the heart of Semantic Computing.
    Further, using organic search, we are able to annotate our search experiences.  For example, it is difficult to find satisfactory results in one shot for a complex query “Find the cheapest way to have a 2-week trip visiting Paris, Rome and NewYork in September for under $2,000.”
A user may have to do some research and aggregate a set of services to solve the problem. Using a semantic search, the experience can be documented and repeated. This is very important as this type of information rapidly changes and a user want to obtain repeat updates.
    Another important characteristic of a semantic search is the ability to share information. By sharing a user’s search experiences and knowledge, others may benefit and find their solutions sooner and with higher confidence of the results.
    This is the exciting part of the digital frontier. When you eliminate advertising from searches you exclude those entries that are there only because they have paid to be “found.”  With semantic searches, results become more robust the more searches there are. In short, you learn from similar searches done by unknown colleagues with similar inquiries. When you think of the possibilities that exist for aggregating persons of similar interests and pursuits into virtual communities, the edge of social media and networking starts to take on a very interesting future.

About the Author
Dr. Phillip C-Y. Sheu is the founder of the semantic search management system (http://www.talk2DARWIN.com). He is currently a professor of EECS and Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. He also serves as the Founding Director of the Institute for Semantic Computing, an international research organization that connects industry, government and academia to promote semantic computing technologies. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1986 and 1982, respectively. He has published more than 100 papers in object-relational data and knowledge engineering and their applications. His current research interests include semantic computing and complex biomedical systems. He is a Fellow of IEEE, the founding editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Semantic Computing, and a primary author of the book Semantic Computing (Wiley, 2010).