search to find

News.com picked up on some of the new work thats going on in the acedemic search / information management space in their article Academia’s quest for the ultimate search tool citing Berkeley’s new interdisciplinary department focus on search technology, CMU’s Javelin work focused on Question Answering search technology and MIT’s Simile project.

I particularly like the susinct point MacKenzie makes regarding the benifits of the semantic web architecture that Simile has developed:

A generalized data archive lets you make data work together in ways you couldn’t before

MIT’s START system based on formalizing / mining metadata composed of natural language phrases and sentences I think is another one thats worth mentioning in this space. Opening up a RDF interface to this data in I think would be particularly interesting.

One search engine can’t do everything. Different search engines / strategies will be more effective at addressing different tasks. Being able to expose the data behind these services and allow individuals / organizations the means to tie together this data will be key .