On the Frontier of Search

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A more futuristic image search, which can scan and recognize facial images, is being developed by Massachusetts-based Viisage. It focuses on unique marks on the human face--cheekbones, tip of the nose--and can cross-reference pictures with databases, much to the interest of law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. In Florida, the Pinellas County sheriff's office has outfitted troopers' cars with a system that uses Viisage technology. If a trooper sees someone acting suspiciously, the officer can take a digital image of the person, upload it to a database of criminals, and get back any hits. How hard is it for bad guys to game the system with a beard, a baseball cap or colored contact lenses? Mohamed Lazzouni, the company's chief technology officer, says they would have to change their bone structure to spoof the technology.

CELL PHONES Mobile search is mostly done today with limited text messaging, but by 2008, when more than 75% of new cell phones globally are expected to be Internet-ready, searching the Web on the go will be standard. On the street, and want to find out the nearest movie theater? Or get sports results? Pankaj Shah's mobile service 4INFO, which the 32-year-old launched this February in Palo Alto, Calif., will give you all the information--for free--by text or Internet on your cell phone. Yahoo! also offers such local information.

Want to know more about what you see in front of you? Boston-based Mobot has developed technology that maps the features in a picture taken with a cell-phone camera and matches it to a database of images. "Within a decade, it will be inconceivable that you lived in a world where you couldn't interact with the objects around you--taking a picture and getting back information about it or making a purchase--using a mobile device," says Mobot marketing vice-president Lauren Bigelow. Yahoo! has 61% of the mobile Web market with 15 products, including search, and has developed a technique that simplifies Web pages for small mobile screens.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Search engines are good at matching words across websites but have struggled with nuance to answer questions in everyday language. Google today can answer basic factual queries. The next step is semantic search--looking for meaning, not just matching key words. Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer scientist, uses language-analysis programs to power KnowItAll, which scans documents for facts--Oswald killed J.F.K., for example. So far, KnowItAll has extracted 900 million facts--enabling it to answer questions. Nosa Omoigui, 33, a former Microsoft researcher, founded Bellevue-based Nervana, which analyzes language by linking word patterns contextually to answer questions in defined subject areas, such as medical-research literature.

USER-GENERATED One of the fastest-growing search techniques is tagging, a grassroots phenomenon whereby users label websites with descriptive tags, building a network of knowledge dubbed folksonomy--a taxonomy of knowledge organized by ordinary folk. Yahoo! was quick to spot this trend, and in March bought Flickr, a photo website organized with a communal tagging model. Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo!'s technology director, says the company wants to apply search across all its user-created content. The tagline? "Better search through people."