Technology Review, published by MIT, recently released the annual list of significant innovations from technologists and scientists under the age of 35. This year’s batch of young entrepreneurs includes a wide array of cutting edge technologies that could transform fields such as medicine, communications, and electronics. Two of the innovators are making advances in online search software that could make searching the web easier and more intuitive. 

 

Vik Singh was able to talk his bosses at Yahoo into releasing their proprietary search tags that produce results and rankings. His efforts led to the creation of BOSS (for "Build your Own Search Service"), an application that lets developers take Yahoo search results and manipulate them to provide services tailored to their needs, in some cases by considering personal data that a website has collected. The release of this information has led to various websites, email clients, and mobile phone application developers to build their own customized search results. For example, a social networking site could develop a search feature that tailors results based on your hometown, friends, and other demographic data you have stored there. Searching for “Mexican restaurant” could provide you with a list of places close to your house that are recommended by your acquaintances. Yahoo is already benefiting from releasing their technology as the number of searches through BOSS applications that piggyback their search engine has grown to almost 30 million per day.

 

Not to be outdone, Microsoft also has a young innovator making advances in search technology that can tailor results based on personal data. Jaime Teevan is developing plug-ins for Internet Explorer that can take into account contacts, documents, and other information on a user’s hard drive. An example of this technology in action would be searching for a friend’s last name, which would normally return numerous individuals with the same name or businesses that incorporate an aspect of her name. With the plug-in turned on, the top results would be for your personal friend. Other features would include keeping a history of past searches, making it easier to recall past sites of interest. Because the information from your hard drive is never shared with the web, the technology is secure. Much of Teevan’s work will likely find its way into Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, which is making a strong push into the online search market.

 

The competition between these two search giants is likely to provide all of us with improvements to a technology we use daily. The neat thing about these innovations is that they are attempting to give us search results based on what we as individuals are actually looking for instead of a list of popular tag words.

 

Read the full article at Technology Review