Surfing the wave or taking a road less traveled: The 2008 Infonortics Search Engine Meeting

T he 2008 Infonortics Search Engine Meeting was held in Boston on April 28-29. As in the past, this meeting included talks and vendor booths from commercial organizations and universities. Most of the PowerPoint presentations are available at the conference website: describing XML retrieval research representative of what is presented at conferences such as INEX (Initiative for the Evaluation of XML). While this paper was voted the best paper of the conference, it was one of the least typical of the search engine meeting. More typical papers described commercial search products. The second paper, presented by Stephen Arnold, described new semantic web technologies being developed by Google. He claims that Google is cornering this market and that would-be competitors, rather than attempting to compete directly, should instead surf the wave made by Google. Most of the presentations were on enterprise search and business intelligence. Within this category several subcategories were present, though often a company's presentation fit in more than one category. Several presentations, notably the one given by Abe Lederman of Deep Web Technologies, addressed the problem of accessing the deep or hidden web. ISYS' presentation described the iterative nature of search and the need to understand different types of users and information needs. Edwin Cooper of InQuira made a similar point, of which more will be said below. Several presenters described technologies that allowed structured and unstructured data to be searched together. Sid Probstein of Attivio focused on this point. Spencer Shearer of Exalead added to the discussion of structured and unstructured data the concept of hybrid search, utilizing mashup technology. He claims that using mashups would fill the large search gaps missed by both structured and unstructured search. Other business intelligence presentations described different variations of semantic search. Pascal Coupet of Temis emphasized the importance of accurate information extraction and described technology that enabled users to correct errors in automatic extraction. Roger Bradford of Agilex Technologies discussed sentiment detection. Kelly Stirman of Mark Logic also described sentiment detection, but based on support-vector-machine technology. Sam Chapman of the University of Sheffield described a commercial spin-off, Know , based on his university's extensive research and development in the area of natural language understanding. This technology combines keyword and semantic approaches to search. George Chitouras of Business Objects also discussed combining information retrieval and natural language technologies. Jeff Fried of Microsoft spoke on the confluence of search and business intelligence. …