1. What’s next for search engine
Xuehua Shen
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

2. Outline Search for special person Search for special domain
Question Answering

3. Search for special person
Every Search Engine is doing personalized search
Special Search Engine for special person
Obstacles: Privacy, Computation Cost…
Search Agent at the client side: UCAIR, Google
Build a client search engine agent which communicates with search engine through a special protocol, manage user information and guarantee user privacy

4. Search for Special Domain
General Search Engine is too general, One size does not fit all
Special Search Engine for special domain, e.g. search engine for sports information, for tourism information
Search Engines will become professional too, labor division of search engine society, just like the human being!
Investigate and find a domain which has a big market (e.g., financial info) or great impact on the society (e.g. medical info) and then develop and update such a search engine

5. Question Answering
Existing Search Engine works for homepage finding task, not for many other tasks
Holy Grail of Search Engine: finding the answer to every question
Huge knowledge base: e.g., wikipedia, FindLaw and WebMD (answer exists on the web)
Spend billions $ on the organization and mapping of questions and answers