Techno Files: At I.B.M., That Google Thing Is So Yesterday

December 26, 2004
 By JAMES FALLOWS


SUDDENLY, the computer world is interesting again. The last three
months of 2004 brought more innovation, faster, than users have
seen in years. The recent flow of products and services differs
from those of previous hotly competitive eras in two ways. The
most attractive offerings are free, and they are concentrated in
the newly sexy field of "search."

Google, current heavyweight among systems for searching the
Internet, has not let up from its pattern of introducing features
and products every few weeks. Apart from its celebrated plan to
index the contents of several university libraries, Google has
recently released "beta" (trial) versions of Google Scholar, which
returns abstracts of academic papers and shows how often they are
cited by other scholars, and Google Suggest, a weirdly intriguing
feature that tries to guess the object of your search after you
have typed only a letter or two. Give it "po" and it will show
shortcuts to poetry, Pokémon, post office, and other popular
searches. (If you stop after "p" it will suggest "Paris Hilton.")
In practice, this is more useful than it sounds.

Microsoft, heavyweight of the rest of computerdom, has scrambled
to catch up with search innovations from Google and others. On
Dec. 10, a company official made a shocking disclosure. For years
Microsoft had emphasized the importance of "WinFS," a
fundamentally new file system that would make it much easier for
users to search and manage information on their own computers.
Last summer, the company said that WinFS would not be ready in
time for inclusion with its next version of Windows, called
Longhorn. The latest news was that WinFS would not be ready even
for the release after that, which pushed its likely delivery at
least five years into the future. This seemed to put Microsoft
entirely out of the running in desktop search. But within three
days, it had released a beta version of its new desktop search
utility, which it had previously said would not be available for
months.

Meanwhile, a flurry of mergers, announcements and deals from
smaller players produced a dazzling variety of new search
possibilities. Early this month Yahoo said it would use the
excellent indexing program X1 as the basis for its own desktop
search system, which it would distribute free to its users. The
search company Autonomy, which has specialized in indexing
corporate data, also got into the new competition, as did Ask
Jeeves, EarthLink, and smaller companies like dTSearch, Copernic,
Accoona and many others.


I have most of these systems running all at once on my computer,
and if they don't melt it down or blow it up I will report later
on how each works. But today's subject is the virtually
unpublicized search strategy of another industry heavyweight:
I.B.M.

Last week I visited the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in
Hawthorne, 20 miles north of New York, to hear six I.B.M.
researchers describe their company's concept of "the future of
search." Concepts and demos are different from products being
shipped and sold, so it is unfair to compare what I.B.M. is
promising with what others are doing now. Still, the promise seems
great.

Two weeks before our meeting, I.B.M. released OmniFind, the first
program to take advantage of its new strategy for solving search
problems. This approach, which it calls unstructured information
management architecture, or UIMA, will, according to I.B.M., lead
to a third generation in the ability to retrieve computerized
data. The first generation, according to this scheme, is simple
keyword match - finding all documents that contain a certain name
or address. This is all most desktop search systems can do - or
need to do, because you're mainly looking for an e-mail message or
memorandum you already know is there. The next generation is the
Web-based search now best performed by Google, which uses keywords
and many other indicators to match a query to a list of sites.

I.B.M. says that its tools will make possible a further search
approach, that of "discovery systems" that will extract the
underlying meaning from stored material no matter how it is
structured (databases, e-mail files, audio recordings, pictures or
video files) or even what language it is in. The specific means
for doing so involve steps that will raise suspicions among many
computer veterans. These include "natural language processing,"
computerized translation of foreign languages and other efforts
that have broken the hearts of artificial-intelligence researchers
through the years. But the combination of ever-faster computers
and ever-evolving programming allowed the systems I saw to succeed
at tasks that have beaten their predecessors.

One example is question answering. Google-type search engines are
fabulous at retrieving random data, but mediocre at handling
subtler queries. Using Google or Ask Jeeves, you can eventually
find out how many of the world's Web pages are in each of the
major languages, but it's slow and frustrating compared with
finding out, say, Mozart's birthplace. Jennifer Chu-Carroll of
I.B.M. demonstrated a system called Piquant, which analyzed the
semantic structure of a passage and therefore exposed "knowledge"
that wasn't explicitly there. After scanning a news article about
Canadian politics, the system responded correctly to the question,
"Who is Canada's prime minister?" even though those exact words
didn't appear in the article.

The Semantic Analysis Workbench, demonstrated by Eric Brown and
Dave Ferrucci, showed another way of exposing latent meaning. The
I.B.M. officials said the best use for this technology would be
customer-support call centers: As representatives took notes on
the problems people were having with their cars or computers or
prescription drugs, automatic interpretation of the results would
reveal useful patterns. Arthur Ciccolo, an I.B.M. strategist for
its unstructured-information project, said that call centers would
be the first place for new search systems to be applied.
Genomic-research projects, where unexpected correlations can be
crucial, might be the second. But the demonstration suggested
another likely market, since every bit of sample text was a
transcript of intercepted phone calls, apparently among people
suspected of terrorism. ("He made two calls from Frankfurt on
these dates ... ") Whether these were real, I still don't know.

Salim Roukos demonstrated a system I would like to have tomorrow:
an assortment of news headlines, roughly comparable to Google
News, but from non-English language sources. The system
automatically - and comprehensibly - translated the headlines and
leads of each article. If you wanted to read more, you pressed a
button and in 15 or 20 seconds had a good-enough translation.



MR. CICCOLO, the search strategist, said that in a way his team
was trying to match - and reverse - what Google has achieved. "As
Google use became widespread, people began asking why it was so
much easier to find material on the external Web than it was on
their own computers or in their company's Web sites," he said.
"Google sets a very high standard for that Web. We would like to
set the next standard, so that people will find it so easy to do
things at work that they'll wonder why they can't do them on the
Internet." How soon might this happen? He said, with a chuckle,
"Well, if I could freeze what everyone else is doing, it could be
in two years." The great part is, the competition won't be frozen.
At least this part of the future looks bright.

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic
Monthly. E-mail: tfiles@nytimes.com.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/26/business/yourmoney/26techno.html?ex=1105112670&ei=1&en=cf953ba94eb4f32c