Open Information Extraction

Bob Brown noted in NetworkWorld that Oren Etzioni, the CEO of Decide.com believes that keyword search techniques will be obsolete in a few years. Etzioni believes that computers will be smart enough to answer our verbal questions on general topics, a technology he dubs Open Information Extraction (IE). Etzioni on his corporate blog cites an opinion piece he wrote in Nature where he said that "we will soon view keyword search 'with the same nostalgia and amusement reserved for bygone technologies such as electric type-writers and vinyl records.'”

We will have to wait and see how quickly this technology impacts our handling of knowledge. I suspect that Etzioni's "soon" may be at least a decade in the future, except for some very crude searches or targeted applications.

-DD