Google has announced that aspects of the Orion program will be integrated into the company’s search engine.

The technology was developed by UNSW PhD student, Ori Allon, who is a finalist in the NewSouth Innovations Inventor of the Year Awards to be announced on April 23rd.

Google, one of the world’s biggest players in the Internet business, bought the rights to Orion from NSi two years ago.
The California-based company also hired Allon, whose algorithm is set to improve the performance of Google’s search engine.

Search engines do their job by using keywords to locate content on the web. Orion’s cleverness is its ability to find relevant related content quickly and accurately.

It achieves this in two ways: it suggests other keywords for web browsing, and includes short snippets of text for each search result so users can evaluate these before they click through to the webpage.

Mr Allon has said the inclusion of extra keywords means that the search engine can offer “an expert search without having an expert's knowledge.” This increases search quality by helping users to find pages with more relevant content and allows users to select the most appropriate query more often.

Says Allon: “Take a search such as the American Revolution as an example of how the system works. Orion would bring up results with extracts containing this phrase. But it would also give results for American History, George Washington, American Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Boston Tea Party and more. You obtain
much more valuable information from every search.”

Funded by an Australian Research Council, Mr Allon completed a bachelor and masters degree at Monash University and came to UNSW to complete his doctorate in Computer Sciences School at UNSW's Kensington campus. He will receive his PhD from the University of New South Wales on April 25th.


See the Sydney Morning Herald Story here.