Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

In the recent International Congress of Mathematics host in Madrid, Spain, the International Mathematical Union (IMU) awarded the Field Medals, what is considered to be the Nobel prize of mathematics (for a very interesting discussion about why there are no mathematics Nobel prizes read this article), and this was all over the news because of the rejection of the award by Grigori Perelman (I think that the fact that IMU still awarded him with the prize even knowing that he was going to decline it was pretty good and talks a lot about how mathematicians still appreciate science and not just politics).

Another prize that was awarded and that is a lot more relevant for today’s Internet was the Nevanlinna Prize that went to Jon Kleinberg for his work on Web organization and search engines through his theory of hubs and authorities, something consider an alternative/inspiration to Page Rank. Wikipedia claims that his algorithm is not commonly implemented in commercial search engines due to computational issues (part of the innovation that Google did with PageRank was not only on coming up with the ranking mechanism but showing how it could be calculated in an computationally efficient way, something that is not obvious when you are dealing with the massive size of the Web and given the fact that Page Rank is a recursive definition). I sort of remember that the hubs and authorities concept was actually used somewhere commercially so a bit of Web research pointed me to this other Wikipedia article that talks about Teoma, the search engine that now powers ask.com (which I have started to use more and more often, I think that they are doing pretty cool thinks, same goes for Amazon’s A9, btw, can someone tell me why A9 is called A9?) and how the ideas for that search engine started at the IBM project Clever which Kleinberg worked on and where his paper was originally written (btw, it is funny to see how researches still use Tex/Latex and generate PS files instead of PDFs).

I think that we will still see more innovation in search technology coming up in the next few years so we need more Jon Kleinbergs out there. The reason I think this is that search is still largely an unsolved problem in many respects. Just do a simple test, ask someone on the street “search engines” and the answer will be most of the time Google, Yahoo! and perhaps MSN search. Well, do a search for “search engines” in Google and you can see that Google cannot even recognize itself as a search engine in the first search results (see screen shot above) and the same search in Yahoo! (screen shot below) does better since it lists search engines but none of them is Google or Yahoo! (so they cannot also recognize themselves).

CD

Share on Facebook