Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Although we credit Google, Yahoo , and other major search engines for giving us the system we use to find the information we seek, the concept of hypertext came to life in 1945 when Vannaver Bush urged scientist to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all man kind. He then proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex. But there is a long list of great minds that have given us the information system we now use today. This article illustrates some of them. Here is the History of the Search Engine: Ted Nelson Ted Nelson created Project Xanadu in 1960 and coined the term hypertext in 1963. His goal with Project Xanadu was to create a computer network with a simple user interface that solved many social problems like attribution. While Ted's project Xanadu, for reasons unknown, never really took off, much of the inspiration to create the WWW came from Ted...

Millions of searches are conducted each day on popular search engines by people all around the world. What are they looking for? A number of major search engines provide a way to glimpse into the web's query stream to discover the most popular search keywords or topics. These are: AOL Hot Searches : Top current queries, or see those in the last hour, last day and within particular categories. Ask IQ : See top searches at Ask. Dogpile SearchSpy : Choose to see either a filtered or non-filtered sample of top, real-time search terms from this popular meta search service. Sister site MetaCrawler offers a similar MetaCrawler MetaSpy service. Google Trends : Allows you to tap into Google's database of searches, to determine what's popular. View the volume of queries over time, by city, regions, languages and so on. Compare multiple terms, as well. See our review: Google Trends: Peer Into Google's Database Of Searches . Google Zeitgeist : What people are searchi...

The ‘dark' version of Google, aptly termed ‘Blackle,' is making waves in the Net. Darker does not have any disturbing moral connotations here. In fact it is quite ‘lighter' in terms of the monthly power bill. Blackle is the same as Google except that the background is totally black and the text is in light grey ( www.blackle.com ). It was set up by Heap Media, an Australian firm, after environmentalists proved that black screens consumed only 59 watts of power while white screens consumed about 79 watts. You can save lots of power by using black background. Heap Media founder Tony Heap said that Blackle would not solve the world's energy problem but was a small effort in that direction. The response to Blackle has been so great that the site even crashed several times. But Google said it has no plans to have a black background.

Each day, around the world, millions of people log into onlysearch engines to, well, search for study. The other day I logged into a search engine and typed, just for the heck of it, the words “pudgy dogs”. And, voila, I got scores of hits. Now, what next for search engines, in the age of social networking? I spoke to Rod Brachman, vice president, worldwide research operations at Yahoo! Research. Dr Brachman has been, as they say, around the block. He was earlier director of the information processing technology office at the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, and is considered an authority on artificial intelligence. I asked him where online search was headed. “Search engine companies are now beginning to look at social networks. At Yahoo!, we have started doing some research on how social networks work. Frankly, social networks, though popular, are quite crude in their technology,” he said. What’s Yahoo! area of focus in this? “We don’t yet understand how online social groups...