Refining the Search Engine

An interview wth Ramesh Jain from Georgia Tech. "Current search engines like Google do not give me a 'steering wheel' for searching the Internet.....The search engines get faster and faster, but they're not giving me any control mechanism. The only control mechanism, which is also a stateless control mechanism, asks the searcher to put in keywords, and if I put in keywords I get this huge monstrous list. I have no idea how to refine this list. The only way is to come up with a completely new keyword list. I also don't know what to do with the 8 million results that Google threw at me. So when I am trying to come up with those keywords, I don't know really where I am. That means I cannot control that list very easily because I don't have a holistic picture of that list. That's very important. When I get these results, how do I get some kind of holistic representation of what these results are, how they are distributed among different dimensions."