At Gord Hotchkiss’ site we can find interesting interview with dr Teena Moody from UCLA’s Semel Institute, who conducted survey on how human’s brain work during searching the web. The research is based on the method name as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Main goal of this research was to find out on the scale of differences between human’s brain work during reading and searching the web. Another dimension of the research was to check if there are any differences between different grops of people - heavy users and novices.

Magnetic resonance revealed that brains of novices, named by dr Moody Internet-naive persons, during searching the web behave at the same way as they were reading, on the other hand heavy users’ brains work more activelly, more brain centers are active. Especially front and limbic lobes are being used by heavy-searchers. These two lobes are responsible for making decisions and conflict settlement.

Brain centres active during searching the web for heavy-users and novices:

Explanation for that fact is quite simple, using the Internet changes our brain work procedures, people who do not use Internet everyday behave like children in the mist - they just fell lost in new enviroment and act like they were reading it, gathering the information to get the full scope of view. However heavy-users make decisions basing on the information the just have found in perfectly known enviroment.

This partly supports thesis that using Internet changes our brains.

-mw

Amazon Web Services published almost one terabyte of knowledge, databases of different sorts are now available and accessible. Among them we can find US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, DBPedia Knowledge Base, Freebase Data Dump, Wikipedia Extraction and NCBI Genbank. This cloud of information can be processed with ease by creating EBS volume, basing it on the snapshot ID of the data, attaching created volume to a running EC2 instance in the same disk space and adding mount point and mount the EBS volume on the instance. Downloading these inconceivable dataset is not necessary any longer.

This can be found to be the milestone in starting the web cloud computing space. The main use for these cloud will be availing these information for bots, that will process them and support humans with their structured knowledge.

-mw

When one faces the deluge of information one of most important issues becomes the fact of credibility of information we get from the Web. There are methods of setting the track record for particular websites (based on monitoring the site’s credibility), but there’s no guarantee that the site we find trustworthy would be among the results for particular query. Answer and remedium for this problem, can be Google Wiki Search, that enables to mark up specific site (for example the one we consider to be a good source of information). This site would be always at the top of search results site, when we search for terms that can be boiled up to the same category (for example try financial crisis and credit crisis).

In this case we can observe completetly new approach - giving credibility status with web tools is individualized, previously there were start-ups basing on social suggestions, Eurekster or Mahlo, just to give examples. But in this case we were forced to trust the community - which in fact remained anonymous. These services are not closed, opened social services that gather opinions from enthusiasts who, in many cases, lack the elementary knowledge in specialized disciplines, like for examples economy, medicine or others. On the one hand - it is the silent bauty of Web 2.0 - every amteur can become an expert, but on the other hand during searching the Web to get the information essential to your company or research it can just complicate things and waste our time.

Trust if of course the basis of each society (at least these highly developed ones), but wasn’t the web since it beginning a meritocratic phenomenon? I do not claim that democratization of Web is something wrong, it is good, it enhances the flow of opinions and provides another areas of potential business-making but… user-generated content affects the web credibility. In the field of retrieving credible information, that can determine the success of our venture or our client’s venture it seems that it is better to trust competent people. Social marked search results can be useful just for preparing the popularity ranks among particular web communities and at a pinch to get the opinion of web users.

-mw

At ZDNet you can read the article, by Jonathan Young from Attivio, about the current situation on search markets, trends and divagations about future. We can also get more complex view on the web search history up to now.

Young summarizes the current situation listing following trends:

1. databases and search engines convergence will force the search engines designers to improve the support for databases operations. Young claims that upgrading methodology of indexing will be not sufficient, completely new solution has to be found;
2. He mentions that the search experience is changing what results with new search engines division - analysing, synthesising, exploratory etc., side-effect is the new sort of navigation in search engines;
3. Improvements on the field of search engine interface;
4. beggining of new generation of search engines, which provide search solutions for particular branches by building in protocols appropriate for these narrow branches.

Recently you could have read about last two points (point 3 - here, point 4 - here).

-mw

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo reached an agreement on set of rules of dealing with the question of doing business in countries where freedom of speech and human rights are restricted. Let’s remind that in the past these companies were criticized by watchdogs, NGOs and even US Congress for “enabling censorship in such countries“, we read in yesterdays WSJ.

According to this set of principles IT giants are going to protect personal information of their users around the world and implement goverment demanding in way that compromises privacy. They declared also to make deepened reasearch on fields of securizing personal information and freedom of speech before launching new ventures - as we can read at SearchEngineLand. This declaration is supposed to be open project and other companies can join and decalare to respect this rules too.

Honestly I dare to doubt that it will turn out efficient. It looks like CSR strategy movement. UN acting in the symbolic field of policy cannot deal with that, becuse of economic interests of its members. It’s rather doubtful that commercial organizations, set on making profit, will do it. But let’s do not judge nothing, the idea is decent and worthy. If it work it will be a new beggining of Web as grassroots medium - free information circulation with bypassing the censored servers. But of course it will not solve all problems.