popular search engines 1.0
search engines are our main tool in order to navigate through the internet (31 billion search requests are sent to google every month). they work precise, fast and on request.
most of us just use the engine without knowing how it works. where does google receives all the information from? well, to keep it short: it permanentally crawls the internet for new information using links for references and site content for description. google repeats object-describing information.
from a web 1.0 perspective (google is very much 1.0 from my pov) this works good for text based media such as websites, less good for image based media such as pictures and video.
manual meta tag @ polar rose
web 2.0 brings text to image. swedish startup Polar Rose is a good example for storing meta information regarding the content in every picture (i.e. in exif meta file). facebook already combined this technology with a social network. and Riya, a US-based ‘visual’ search engine, combines not only text information than as well color and pattern information in order to find better results. the upcoming generation of search engines will use meta tags in order to improve search results. examples for image-meta-data: date picture taken, GPS information, who is in the picture, etc.
what is the future of search? well, lets just assume that the memory power will improve, pattern analyzers will become better and footage resolution will raise.
computer will start to search for individual, personal properties and compare them to each other. comparing eyeballs or face patterns from a surveillance camera to a database – concealable fingerprints that are available on every picture. we know this already from CSI or Minority Report and it is very likely that it will become real. royal palm middle school in phoenix USA installed face recognition video surveillance as a first pilot.
just imagine a public-available search engine starts crawling the internet comparing eyeballs or face patterns to each other. Riya, on a much more sophisticated level, could deliver excellent search results. we might find pictures and videos of ourselves we did not even know about. others might find pictures and videos of ourselves we do not want be known about. the ‘anonymity’ of the internet might finally catch up with us.
