The Hindu Business Line : From desktop to `Webtop'

What words spring to your mind when you think of the World Wide Web? Huge? Information giver? It will soon be more than that, say researchers at Yahoo.

Speaking at the Big Thinker series organised by Yahoo! India, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Vice-President and Research Fellow, Yahoo!, said that as the Desktop metamorphoses into a `Webtop,' online content will change.

"The Web is humongous. But who cares? It's just a screen that you see. The user is all," says Ramakrishnan. And it is this user and the social community he belongs to, which will be exploited by search engines.

Soon searches will be able to interpret real world needs and offer the user an answer that is closer to what he/she really wanted to know, even if it is slightly skewed (according to the computer!).

So even as these researchers figure out what is behind the social community philosophy — why do people tag and share?— they are also exploring the ways to exploit it.

Social search engines will learn from shared community interactions and leverage them to refine content online.

They will expand search results to include sources of information (experts) to maintain credibility. This will mean a bigger challenge in protecting privacy, and gaining trust of us users. The future of the Internet is this: our ultimate utility service. The challenge for those working on aspects of the Internet will be how to maintain and leverage structured, integrated views of Web content.

Web as active participant

Yahoo!, as a project to test a hypothesis, built DBLife, a Web site that lets you search amongst the community of database researchers for someone you need to look up.

DB Life immediately offers profiles of the person you were searching for, along with others with the same name. It even lets you vote on whether the information offered is accurate.

This is just one example of a social community site. Many more such people-centric search engines will pop up, which will make the reality of a PC becoming just a means to connect to another human being, true.

However, for all this to take place, users need to do more than consume. We will need to contribute, to work to make this whole new virtual world better for the future.

Mass collaboration in the Web 2.0 era is even helping corporates such as Compaq offer better customer service.

The Web is no longer a collection of documents. No longer a passive warehouse where data, numbers, reside. It is now going to be an active participant in your life.

It will have relationships, and will let applications talk to each other (this is termed mash-ups). Mash ups are remarkable little applications that combine two services on a single Web site.

Take the example of Mappr - it combines mapping with a photo service, so you could explore a city based on the photos taken of it by other users.

With the arrival of location-based search and better user interfaces, applications will also evolve to do challenging tasks by involving users. We are already seeing a shift to hosted applications and models such as Software as a service (SaaS). E-mail is also no longer just a means of communication. It is being trusted for storage.

The Web is scientifically young but it is intellectually diverse — thanks to us. The social element and technology will mingle this year to create a better, more personal, Web.

"The new Web is more than search. The underlying science must capture the economic, legal and sociological reality. We are on the cusp of a new generation of World Wide Web," says Ramakrishnan.

And all this reminds us of the legendary movie Star Wars, which speaks of the Force — something that envelops us all, and has powerful momentum. We are part of that force, and have much to do to take the Internet, and the next generation ahead. Let's get started.

May the Force be with you.

preethij@thehindu.co.in