Simon’s Blog

Steve Gillmor thinks that Page Rank as a concept is on its way out, and that “attention” is on its way in. I think he might well be right. To understand why, you first have to understand that Page Rank is simply a hack that makes keyword-based search appear to be not as bad as it really is. (Yes, I know… it’s hack that built a $100B business!)

I’ve quoted myself before on the topic of next-generation search, but it probably bears repeating. This, is from a 2001 article I wrote on natural language understanding.

Keyword-based methods tend not to be helpful in cases in which a large amount of information needs to be searched. Searches are highly sensitive to small changes in the formulation of a query, the output is not always ranked in order of relevancy, results may be misleading because important results are missed, and large numbers of false positive results may be returned.

Of course, Page Rank has actually served us pretty well for a while. However, people are increasingly finding that some things are simply “impossible to Google“. In other words, “search” isn’t done. And in fact, “search” isn’t the be-all-and-end-all. People need and are already finding better ways to get hold of information that’s of interest to them. Attention and gestures of attention are pretty promising ideas.

Hmmm… maybe it’s time I thought about updating my old Attentional Processing algorithms…

They work on any kind of data, not just natural language…