Section 6 in Chapter 10 talks about how link analysis is applied in modern web search. This online article would be a good source for one who wants to know more about in what direction current link analysis would be improved by major search engines. The article can be found at: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3628767

In this article, Andrew Tomkins, chief scientist for search at Yahoo, says Yahoo is taking a new approach to search which is a task-based approach to improve results to focus on the user’s task stage. At Yahoo, researchers are making changes in both a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach with a main goal of making search easier for users to complete their tasks. According to Tomkins, Yahoo is picturing the next generation of search as a service that comprehends a customer’s needs and adjusts the way search engine looks for information in order to achieve perceived goals. With more focus on productivity and conversation sort of technique between a search engine and a user, Yahoo’ new search places a user in a  control position where the user is the one who drives the search the way one wants, instead of a search engine trying to take charge of identifying a user’s intent. As discussed in Chapter 10.6, traditional analysis on anchor text, links, and content was a major source in determining relevance. Recent researches have been examining other signals such as user clicks and engagement for this new refined approach to search. It is also likely that their findings include new ways to rank content-based search, understanding queries and analysis in a task a user is involved in.

As discussed in text, to prevent competing search engines from finding out what Yahoo is doing and growth of SEO, the article is not specifically talking about how new search would be processed. However, it gives a good simple picture of how search techniques are being used currently and how these will be modified to meet a user’s need in the future. Since the web is such a fast-paced environment and these days, most people choose to go online to retrieve information they need, search engines are especially expected to keep up with the pace of changes in a user’s interest. It is interesting to see that user clicks and engagement are new clues researchers are using to refine the search. It is helpful information for search engines to access user clicks and user’s engagement to provide most relevant information. However, it seems there needs to be also some restrictions to ensure a user’s privacy. When search engines used to crawl and rank pages to show in response to a query, these techniques did not require history records of a user, but as the search evolves more like a series of interactions between search engine and a user, effective search techniques tend to step on a user’s privacy. The direction suggested by Tomkins reflects well the trend in the Web these days, but I also wonder how the issue of privacy will be handled in using these new clues.