Opening Keynote

Found -but Still Lost- on the Internet: The Secret World of Internet Search Technologies

Thursday, June 19th
8:30am - 10:00am
Location TBA

David Billick
Information Engineer, Microsoft Corporation
and Past President of the American Society of Indexers

Do you search the Web? Are you finding what you need? Are you sure? Information discovery in any large domain is inherently a language-centric problem involving a range of intellectual and human-computer interaction issues. Most users of Internet search engines are unaware of how searching works and largely trust the information they find. "Found -but Still Lost- on the Internet" examines some of the technologies used in Web search systems and suggests that they are still imperfect, partial solutions to a difficult problem. The presentation demonstrates that in spite of years of development of some technological components, the essential challenge of finding the right information has changed little from years ago when the primary conduit to information was a librarian at the reference desk. Thus whether engaging a person or a computer the essential problems of information discovery still have to do with naming, ambiguity, and feedback.

This session will be of interest to anyone who searches the web or assists students and faculty conduct searches, as well as those interested in meta tagging, multilingual searching, and related issues of information management.

David Billick received a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese from the University of Iowa in 1976. He taught courses in Spanish language and literature at the University of Iowa, Rutgers and the University of Michigan and published several books and articles on medieval and 19th-century Spanish literature. David's life-long passion for finding and organizing information led him to cataloging and reference services positions at the University of Michigan Graduate Library. In 1983 he was hired by ProQuest Information and Learning (then University Microfilms Inc.) in Ann Arbor. At UMI David worked on the development of online proprietary databases and in 1986 evolved some of them into the very first commercially-available CD-ROM databases. In 1992, he helped make the Dissertations Abstracts database one of the first commercial databases searchable on the Internet. Later he laid the foundation to enable the conversion of all of UMI's tens of millions of microfilmed documents to digital format. In 1995 David joined Microsoft where he worked on several Internet search projects leading to the launch of search.msn.com, now one of the world's most heavily-used Internet search engines, serving up over 100 million queries a day in thirty languages. In early 2002, he moved to a new division focused on building the foundation for smarter, integrated text and speech search functions for future releases of Microsoft products including Windows and Office.