J OURNAL OF OBJECT TECHNOLOGY Online at http://www.jot.fm . Published by ETH Zurich, Chair of Software Engineering ©JOT, 2008 Vol. 7, No. 3, March-April 2008 Cite this writing as follows: Won Kim, Ok-Ran Jeong, Hyungsuk Ji, Sangwon Lee: “On Web Search: Some Activities and Challenges”, in Journal of Object Technology, vol. 7, no. 3, March - April 08, pp. 49 - 54 http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2008_03/column5 / On Web Search: Some Activities and Challenges Won Kim, Ok-Ran Jeong, Hyungsuk Ji, Sangwon Lee Abstract Internet search engines have become an indispensable part of everyday living and business today. Although the capabilities of Internet search engines are incrementally improving steadily, it may be time for us to explore a few new directions that can take the search engines to the next level. In this article, we will summarize the current activities in advancing the state of Internet search engines, and explore a few directions of research and development. 1 INTRODUCTION Thanks to Internet search engine companies such as Google, Yahoo, Baidu, MSN, Naver, etc., and mass participation and collaboration by hundreds of millions of people around the world, people today are able to find all sorts of knowledge they seek instantly, inexpensively, and from almost anywhere. A quiet but tectonic revolution has been unfolding. Inspired by Internet search engines, search engines are being included within large Web sites, such as e-commerce sites, corporate sites, and social networking sites. However, search engines have very difficult technical challenges to wrestle with, for the problems they have set out to address are the longstanding natural language understanding problems. As it is exceedingly difficult to have software understand free-form text in arbitrary domains, search engines have taken to analyzing user-supplied keywords, search histories that give clues, demographic profiles, the number of links into Web pages, etc. to match the user’s intent with the contents of the Web pages. Although this approach has been tuned and optimized to achieve remarkable success and delivered tremendous value to people, there are some serious long-term challenges. In the remainder of this article, we will briefly summarize the current technical activities led by Internet search engine companies to advance the state of Internet search engines, and examine a few new directions of research and development to meet the long-term challenges. 2 TECHNICAL ACTIVITIES In China, Baidu is the market leader, and in Korea, Naver is the dominant market leader in the search and online advertising market. However, worldwide, and in the