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A few thoughts about the future of Internet Information Retrieval
It seems likely that the specialization in the Internet Information
Retrieval (IIR) business will continue. Internet information crawling,
pre-processing, indexing, searching and presentation requires
different types of technologies and know-how, this might create
opportunities for new companies specializing in only one steps of the
IIR "food chain". One possibility could be that companies doing
crawling will do offer extracts of relevant data on request, e.g. a
search engine specializing in winter sports could get only relevant
data extracted from several regional crawler companies. In other
words, the IIR "food chain" might increase in length.
Potential new players
As the importance of Internet Information Retrieval grows, players
that have been concentrating on the lower end of the Internet "food
chain", i.e. major bandwidth providers (e.g. MCI or British Telecom) and network software/hardware vendors (e.g. 3COM or Cisco) might want to enter the market as providers of partially indexed data to search engines and topic hierarchies.
Potential new technologies
With the increased growth of the amount of data on the Internet, new
technologies for doing distributed indexing/search of data will
probably occur. This is particularly interesting if processing and
indexing of multimedia data (e.g. sound, pictures and video) becomes
popular. Processing of multimedia data is considerably more CPU
intensive than processing of textual data. Example of such processing
could be automatic detection of objects (e.g. a car) in video frames.
Written by Amund Tveit, 2000-05-29
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