Joint CS/ORIE Colloquium
Tuesday April 22nd, 2003
4:15 PM
B17 Upson Hall

David P. Williamson
IBM Almaden Research Center
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/dpw/

Searching the Workplace Web

The social impact from the World Wide Web cannot be underestimated, but technologies used to build the Web are also revolutionizing the sharing of business and government information within ``intranets''. In many ways the lessons learned from the Internet carry over directly to intranets, but others do not apply. In particular, the social forces that guide the development of intranets are quite different, and the determination of a ``good answer'' for intranet search is quite different than on the Internet.

In this talk, I will discuss the problem of intranet search, based on our experience with IBM's intranet. I will describe a prototype search engine we built using rank aggregation, a technique for combining rankings introduced by Dwork, Kumar, Naor, and Sivakumar. Rank aggregation allows us to examine the effects of different heuristics on ranking of search results.

This work is joint with Ronald Fagin, Ravi Kumar, Kevin McCurley, Jasmine Novak, Dandapani Sivakumar, and John Tomlin, all of IBM Almaden.