Thresher: Searching the Semantic Web

Posted by Lee Odden on Sep 15th, 2005 in Online Marketing |

Search Science blog has posted an interesting paper by Andrew Hogue of Google and David Karger of MIT discussing Thresher, a system that relies on end users to assign meaning of information on web pages rather than relying solely on the information presented by the publisher.

“By allowing end-users to create, modify, and utilize their own patterns, we hope to speed adoption and use of the Semantic Web and its applications.?Ç¬î

I think the search industry will see more and more implementations of end user generated relevance for search results overlaid with current ranking methods. Since it’s not practical for search engines to rate and review every url in their index, end user ratings are really the only way to add the human touch. Although Google is doing some interesting things with Jeteye search engine is a good example of end user input used to determine relevancy.