Searching for a Needle in a Haystack

The news is abuzz with Google's acquisition of a new searching algorithm 'Orion', named after its inventor Ori Allon, a student of the University of New South Wales, and an Isreali by birth. Bill Gates had apparently praised this very algorithm a little time back, and Google has edged out Yahoo! and Microsoft who were also in the fray to get their hands on the algorithm.

This news report takes a crack at describing the search algorithm:

Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to a keyword. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the keyword so the user can pick the most relevant.

As you can see the paragraph creates more questions than it answers. Ori Allon has filed two patent applications for the algorithm at the Australian Patent Office. Sadly, these applications have not been published and are not available to the public. I'd love to have a read. I spent quite some time trying to reach the text (hence the article's name) eventually gave up as patent applications are only published 18 months from the date of filing (these applications were filed in November 2005).

To wrap up this article, here are a couple of tricks for searching using existing search engines. They are probably a part of some Google hacking book or the other but here goes.

1. Stopwords - There are some words that all search engines block by default (such as 'a', 'an', 'the', and 'and').     However, there are some words that you should avoid even though they are available - words like 'free',     'download', 'latest'. These terms are liberally thrown into the metadata of most webpages, and so results that     have nothing to do with what you're looking for appear.
2. The exact quote operator - This is a trick that I find to be quite handy when I am searching for definitions or     facts or numbers. Search for a sentence construct that is followed by what you are looking for. For example,     search for "the lord of the rings was filmed in" using Google, instead of keywords like 'lord', 'rings', 'location',     'filming'. You can quicly get your answer as part of the search result extract that Google provides.

Remember, the more specific/precise the query, the better the results. Happy searching!