From Thinking Machines to thinking about the future of search

Neil Budde is Editor in chief of Yahoo! News, Finance and Sports, and a member of the iFOCOS Search Working Group.

I first became intrigued by search technology when I joined Dow Jones in 1987. The visionary leader of Dow Jones Information Services, Bill Dunn, had just convinced the company to purchase a pair of Connection Machine computers from Thinking Machines Corp. The promise: that the natural language searching and relevance feedback capabilities of the massively parallel computers could open up the vast databases of Dow Jones News/Retrieval to a huge audience of business information users and move the business outside the library and information specialist marketplace.

Of course, the timing was all wrong: the technology wasn’t capable of searching sizable collections of information fast enough and the dial-up command-line interfaces of the time weren’t suitable for this form of searching. Fast forward to today and you find much larger amounts of information being indexed and searched in milliseconds. Yet we still face many of the same problems: users who enter 1-2 word queries and then dig only so deep into the results as well as interfaces that still don’t make search that simple. What is the answer? I’m looking forward to searching for it.