Videos, Images and music: the search engine of the future is European

A team of European researchers is developing PHAROS, a new search engine with highly innovative features.

If you are at a shopping centre and you hear a piece of music you like, today you can only record it and then ask someone for the title. Within a few years, you will have the possibility to send the music you recorded to a search engine, and have the title and recommendation of other songs you may like in reply. A team of European researchers, led by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, has no doubts about it and already gave a name to such an innovative search engine: PHAROS

The project, funded by the European Commission, involves some major industrial and academic players such as France Telecom, Fast and Politecnico di Milano. The objective, as they say at the Politecnico di Milano, is to “bring together the highest competencies of the old continent in the fields of search engines, multimedia data processing and user interfaces to create the search engine of the future”. A multimedia search engine, i.e. capable of not only performing searches on textual documents, but also on audio, video, and image files.

The researchers working on the project believe that PHAROS will indeed be revolutionary. “The technology” – the experts at Politecnico di Milano say – “will let internet users perform searches of new kinds, such as searching within newscasts for all cuts where a particular subject is being addressed. And not only. It will be possible to search within a video collection for all locations similar to the one represented in a picture taken with one’s own portable device”

The features will be manifold. PHAROS has being designed to be extremely open. According to the experts, it will be possible to “plug in any multimedia data analysis algorithm, such as an algorithm which recognises who’s speaking or which searches buildings within video files. This way the system will be capable of harnessing a vast amount of possibilities to perform searches that have never been attempted before”

PHAROS, the developers say, will have typical 2.0 features. “It combines the most strictly technological innovations with a social approach to searching: the ability, i.e., to personalise the responses to queries and the user interface on the basis of the users’ behaviour and more generally on the basis of the overall users community interactions”

Text translated from La Repubblica