Efficient information search in the World Wide Web of future

Searching and analyzing information in large databases and the World Wide Web has become a key issue for business, society, and the sciences, and it is becoming a bottleneck with the ongoing information explosion. Web search engines often fail to provide good results on particularly challenging expert topics, and the maintenance of thematically dedicated databases can no longer keep up with the rapid data growth. More precise information search requires intelligent methods that incorporate explicit knowledge bases in the form of so-called ontologies and combine them with statistical learning methods. Such approaches have much higher computational costs than the standard techniques used in current search engines. Therefore, fast retrieval of good search results also requires more efficient methods for query processing. This article discusses methods that are being developed at the Max-Planck Institute of Computer Science to improve both the search result quality and the search efficiency.