Search-Based Applications. Gregory Grefenstette
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CHAPTER 1
Search Based Applications
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Figure 1.1: Can you see the search engine behind these screens?
Management of information via computers is undergoing a revolutionary change as the frontier between databases and search engines is disappearing. Against this backdrop of nascent convergence, a new class of software has emerged that combines the advantages of each technology, right now, in Search Based Applications.
Until just a short while ago, the lines were still relatively clear. Database software concentrated on creating, storing, maintaining and accessing structured data, where discrete units of information (e.g. product number, quantity available, quantity sold, date) and their relation to each other were well defined. Search engines were primarily concerned with locating a document or a bit of information within collections of unstructured textual data: short abstracts, long reports, newspaper articles, email, Web pages, etc. (classic Information Retrieval, or IR; see Chap. 3).
Business applications were built on top of databases, which defined the universe of information available to the end user, and search engines were used for IR on the Web and in the enterprise.
Figure 1.2: Databases have traditionally been concerned with the world of structured data; search engines with that of unstructured data (some of these data types, like HTML pages and email messages, contain a certain level of exploitable structure, and are consequently sometimes referred to as "semi-structured").
Such neat distinctions are now falling away as the core architectures, functionality and roles of search engines and databases have begun to evolve and converge. A new generation of non-relational databases, which shares conceptual models and structures with search engines, has emerged from the world of the Web (see Chapter 4), and a new breed of search engine has arisen which provides native functionality akin to both relational and non-relational databases (described in Chapters 3-9 and listed in Chapter 10).
It is this new generation engine that supports Search Based Applications, which offer precise, multi-axial information access and analysis that is virtually indistinguishable at a surface level from database applications, yet are endowed with the usability and massive scalability of Web search.
1.1.1 WHAT IS A SEARCH BASED APPLICATION?
We define a Search Based Application (SBA) as any software application built on a search engine backbone rather than a database infrastructure, and whose purpose is not classic IR, but rather mission-oriented information access, analysis or discovery.1
Definition: Search Based Application
A software application that uses a search engine as the primary information access backbone, and whose main purpose is performing a domain-oriented task rather than locating a document. Examples:
Customer service and support
Logistical track and trace Contextual advertising
Decision intelligence
e-Discovery
SBAs may be used to provide more intuitive, meaningful and scalable access to the content in a single database, hiding away the complexity of the database structure as data is extracted and re-purposed by search engine techniques. They may also be used to autonomously and intelligently gather together massive volumes of unstructured and structured data from an unlimited number of sources (internal or external) and to make this aggregate data available in real time to a wide base of users for a broad range of purposes.
While search engines in the SBA context complement rather than replace databases, which remain ideal tools for many types of transaction processing, this ’re-purposing’ of search engines nonetheless represents a major rupture with a 30-year tradition of database-centered software application development. In spite of the significance of this shift, the SBA trend has been unfolding largely under the radar of researchers, systems architects and software developers. However, SBAs have begun to capture the focused attention of business.2
"The elements that make search powerful are not necessarily the search box, but the ability to bring together multiple types of information quickly and understandably, in real time, and at massive scale. Databases have been the underpinning for most of the current generation of enterprise applications; search technologies may well be the software backbone of the future."