Search Mastery Speaker Series: Searching the World
Date/Time: Monday, October 11, 2021 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Location: Virtual
Abstract:
The World-Wide Web’s first name is World-Wide. Despite that, we live much of our lives in an English-Wide Web, limited to finding content in the language of our queries. In this talk I’ll start by demonstrating how content in other languages can be found and used. We’ll then take a peek under the hood of the search and translation technology that’s involved to get a hint of what we might expect to be possible in the future. I’ll talk a bit about what it means for a search engine to be “good,” and how developers draw on that perspective to make search engines better. Finally, I’ll wrap up with a few pointers to where you can learn more about the search and translation technologies that we’ve talked about.
About the Speaker:
Doug Oard is a Professor at the University of Maryland, with joint appointments in the College of Information Studies and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He has a passion for building search engines, for text, speech, and scanned documents that might be in any language. For more about his work, see https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~oard/