Talks by Stephen Robertson at Hokkaido University, July 28 2017
\nDate: 28 July 2017 (Fri) 15:00-17:00
\nVenue: IST Building, room A21
\nTitle\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Search: then and now\u00a0 with particular reference to the web
\nNowadays, we take web search engines for granted. For many people,
\ntheir favourite search engine (Google or some other) is their primary
\nor even sole entry-point to the web. Not only that – it also, in some
\nsense, is the web: what you find by searching is indistinguishable, or
\nat least not distingushed, from the search engine itself. In this
\ntalk, I will attempt to chart how we have reached this point. To
\nstart with, I will go back before search engines or the web even
\nexisted – indeed, before computers existed. Card catalogues in
\nlibraries, printed indexes, punched cards (some mechanically sorted,
\nsome used purely manually) have all played a role in how we see the
\nsearch task. In the computer era, but before the internet or the web,
\nwe started exploring the idea of computer searching, particularly in
\nrelation to abstracts of scientific papers. When the web came along,
\nweb search engines began to emerge, but they took a little longer to
\nbecome mainstream, and then to discover a viable business model. But
\nas both these things happened, a rather extraordinary series of
\nfeedback loops began to shape and mould the search experience. The
\nmost obvious loop is that between the search engine and the population
\nof searchers. The way search engines work, as seen by us the users,
\nhas had a profound effect on our notion of what search is and how we
\nmight use it; and on the other hand, the search engines have responded
\nto and learnt from their users, to an extraordinary extent. Other
\nfeedback loops can be indentified, one involving website designers and
\nanother advertisers, each interacting with (influencing and being
\ninfluenced by) the search engines. The consequence is that the modern
\nsearch engine feels a thousand miles or years removed from its library
\nscience forebears. I will end with a novel way to think about what
\nweb search engines do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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