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Analyzing multimedia is also on the minds of engineers at IBM, which is trying to solve the problems of large organizations with a passel of computer systems. Boolean searches--which require users to learn an arcane vocabulary of "ands," "ors," "nots," and "nears"--are falling by the wayside, says Arthur Ciccolo, department group manager in the research division of IBM and co-leader of the IBM Institute for Search and Text Analysis. "We're at the cusp of a change in all of that."

Instead looking for matching patterns of letters, new search technology looks at documents as "expressions of human language," he says. In addition to syntax, IBM is researching search engines that understand semantics--what words mean in context. Nelson Mattos, a distinguished engineer and VP of information integration at IBM, says the company is developing a software architecture called Unstructured Information Management Architecture, or UIMA, that can help other programs acquire and analyze text, audio, and video, and arrange them into more structured forms.

In the coming year, IBM plans to publish technical details about UIMA that would let independent software vendors build apps that can extract meaning from stored data though text mining and analytics. "This will open the door for what we're calling third-generation search systems that will really be intelligent," Mattos says. For example, a system built with UIMA technology could analyze millions of patient case histories and discover dangerous combinations of drugs. Mattos also suggests that an application to analyze call-center transcripts could detect a defective product early in its design cycle.

Making search engines more contextual also is drawing interest from some sources not usually associated with the needs of big business. At a conference in San Diego this month, Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos introduced OpenSearch, a collection of technologies that lets users of Amazon's A9.com search engine narrow their queries to specialized fields such as medical journals, NASA content, or Microsoft's Developer Network.

Science-fiction author William Gibson once said, "The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." So it is for search technologies. The tools we use now work pretty well. But more esoteric ones employed by just a handful of people today could portend better approaches to come.

Illustration By Brian Stauffer

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