IBU News (Germany) Edition 0.9.9

The paradigm of Internet search needs to be re-cast as one of information discovery, search and retrieval of information dialogs rather than specific documents.

The imperative

The internet makes censorship really work since it can become transparent as air. No need to burn books when there are none. All you have to do is see to it that the books are invisible. While technically, unless it blocked explicitly (and in many parts of the world technology is coming into place to block content while in other countries just being caught with the intent to post content that has not "approved" one can and will land in prison or worse), technically something might be accessible BUT if one does not know where it is--- if its not visible--- it does not exist. At the same time there are many people that "see too much": too much violence, pornography and other content they see unsuitable to themselves and/or their children. The technology to "block" these pages is the same as those used to block page that people want to see but that their governments don't want them to. Its all about visibility. This is Internet Metaphysics 2008 (and has been the case for some years now) and part of the Raison d'être of the new paradigm: Change the visibility.

Visibility

What you see of the Internet is from where you are standing. Its like looking at Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry. You see the skyline from the perspective of where you are standing. Current search engines force everyone to stand in the same place.

"Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web"

New Paradigm

We have a new, remarkably powerful yet simple, model. I've called it "semantic revelation".

The basic idea is that clusters of associations define their own implicit semantics for terms.

Folksonomies (the current fashion of social tagging) assume everyone is speaking the same language with the same shared background. They don't. Everything is NOT Miscellaneous (as David Weinberger suggests).

Words derive their commonality in meaning from those that associate with one another. We don't know what the words mean but might assume that if people are talking to one another that they have shared semantics. That's the basics of normative communication.

John Searle introduced the notion of an 'indirect speech act' as a kind of indirect 'illocutionary' act: "In indirect speech acts the speaker communicates to the hearer more than he actually says by way of relying on their mutually shared background information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, together with the general powers of rationality and inference on the part of the hearer."

Our model goes backwards.. It first asks.. "Who is talking to each other". And "who do I want to talk with". Its guilt by association.

The point is: We don't care what a word or sentence means. We just "assume" that when people talk they understand, more or less, each other but neither is everyone talking with each another nor do they even want to..

When there is no dialogue between listeners, the same words and phrases as spoken by a speaker can mean different things.

Search is also searching for dialogue. Its all, of course, not de-coupled from ranking..

This approach increases the accessibility and visibility of information in the Internet and at the same time allows for people to individually define their own thresholds for what kinds of conversations that they don't want to see. Search after all is about helping people find what they are looking for AND NOT what they don't want to find!

Unit of Retrieval

In "traditional" search engine models there is a standard unit of the record. Its the unit of index (the page, PDF, Word document) and retrieval. By contrast we have a user defined "search time" unit of retrieval: the structure of documents is exploited to identify which document elements (such as the appropriate chapter or page) to retrieve. Retrieval granularity may be on the level of sub-structures of a given document or page such as line, paragraph but may also be as part of a larger collection.
The domain of search is information and this may be a relevant part of a document or a collection of relevant documents (such as a Journal, Newspaper, Encyclopedia, Social Network etc.).

See also: the collaborative works on Multipolar Search: EXODVS as well as the group ExoDus/Exodvs Presentation @ ISEA 2008. National Museum of Singapore.