Europe funds search engine research

In future it may be easier and faster to find what you want on the web thanks to advances in search engine technology.

European researchers have already begun work on the development of more intelligent search engines aimed at reducing the reams of irrelevant information people have to sift through each time they type a topic into a search engine.

The European-funded project SEKT (Semantic Knowledge Technologies) is made up of 12 partners and includes companies such as BT Exact (BT's research arm) and the universities of Sheffield, Innsbruck and Barcelona.

A search engine that can mimic the way we process information and bring up relevant results is the Holy Grail for internet developers and many attempts have been made over the past few years to develop more accurate search tools.

With the vast and ever-increasing amount of information, web pages and forums added to the world-wide-web, SEKT hopes that it can be the first group to develop a search engine capable of assessing the context of the text strings which it uses as the basis of its searches.

It would then be able to deliver results that would be more pertinent and relevant to end users, by filtering out unrelated text before posting results.

This project aims to succeed where others has failed through collaboration with leading academic institutions and agreed standards. ?We are working with leading centres of expertise and to agreed global standards and with other projects around the world,? explained Paul Warren of BT Exact and the project manager for Sekt.

He added that each of the academic institutes in Sekt were leaders in their respective research fields. Sheffield University, he said, has the technical knowledge of syntax and semantics gained through linguistic studies, Karlsruhe University in Germany is a leading centre for artificial intelligence while the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia was renowned for its mathematical technology for understanding language.

The ? ¬12.5million, three-year project will also look at ways of developing tools that will improve the way document management, content management, and knowledge management is handled.