Computer scientist Oren Etzioni at the University of Washington has called upon the international academic community and engineers working in industry to take a bolder approach when designing how people find information online.

Etzioni calls on experts to literally think outside the search box. He imagines a future in which someone would speak a question, such as: “What was the score in today’s Mariners game?” or “Where’s the nearest restaurant that serves great sushi?” and the computer would find an answer by looking through all the data available on the Internet.

Etzioni proposes that instead of simply looking for strings of text, a web search engine would identify basic entities — people, places, things — and uncover the relationships between them. This is the goal of the UW’s Turing Center, which he directs.

“I think the Watson Jeopardy thing is a great demonstration and has galvanized me, personally, to say just how far the technology has come,” Etzioni said. “With the current state of the art in research, coupled with an engineering investment, they were able to produce a system with superhuman performance.”

“Over the next year, I think that we will see substantial progress towards intelligent search,” Etzioni said. “We are seeing it today in shopping search, with Decide.com, and we are seeing it in the preliminary steps that Bing and Google are taking, but the best is yet to come.”

Ref.: Oren Etzioni, Search needs a shake-up, Nature, 476, 25–26 (04 August 2011); [DOI:10.1038/476025a] published on the 20-year anniversary of Tim Berners Lee unveiling his World Wide Web project.