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Search with
TEK
INTERNET/
Obstacles to web browsing like high telephone and ISP charges, can be
overcome with TEK, which enables a web search using only email
Though the Internet is a treasure
house of information there are several obstacles which can drive the user
to frustration. Among them are the narrow bandwidth, which can take a long
time to find the information required. This long duration of time spent
online, means higher telephone and ISP charges, which quickly become
prohibitive. Adding to the woes are the unreliable network infrastructures
and ever failing electricity which can frequently prevent access to the
Internet.
There are search engines which can be deployed to
search the World Wide Web. Most of them are designed for high-bandwidth,
high-connectivity environments. That is, they optimise for speed, assuming
that a user can quickly look through the returned links and immediately
run a second, modified search if she is unhappy with the results of her
first search. This tight feedback loop between the user and search engine
is inappropriate for low-connectivity sites in the developing world where
the bottleneck is the time required to transfer the information, rather
than the server’s delay in finding the information. In a low-bandwidth
environment, exploring the various links on a search engine’s results page
can require a large amount of time.
Also, mainstream search
engines select pages without regard for their bandwidth requirements, a
criterion that might be of primary concern to someone at the end of a slow
connection. In addition, standard search engines return all unique URLs
that matched the user’s query; for users in information-poor environments,
receiving hundreds of thousands of URLs might be more overwhelming than
useful.
The TEK system:
To
make information widely and easily available to the global community, the
Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT has proposed to design a system
that accounts for the varied stages of information technology and Internet
connectivity that exist. This Internet search utility system which is
under development, is being designed for low-connectivity, low-bandwidth
communities. The TEK Search Engine - TEK stands for ‘Time Equals
Knowledge’ - is an asynchronous search engine that transfers both queries
and query results by email. Queries are received in Boston, the Web
searched, and a subset of the ‘found’ information is returned to the
user.
The MIT research has focussed on the development of
novel technologies that are specifically designed to meet the economic and
social constraints of the developing world. While this research
incorporates familiar fields such as information retrieval, data
compression, multi-lingual interfaces, and low-cost devices, it is
distinct from most research conducted in the West in that it is driven to
meet the costs and constraints of developing nations. TEK is not only an
imminent solution to a social need; it is also the first step in a
long-term effort to develop appropriate information technologies for
developing countries.
The system contains three main components : the
TEK Client, the TEK Server, and the TEK Protocol. The TEK search engine
differs from others in that it is designed to return low-bandwidth
results, which are achieved by special filtering, analysis, and
compression on the server side.
The TEK Client runs on the
user's local machine and provides a web-like interface for submitting
queries and viewing results. The Client contains functionality to gather
queries (either for a general search term, or for a specific URL) and to
e-mail those queries to the TEK Server. If a machine is shared by many
users, the TEK Client keeps track of each user's queries, and organises
the results on a per-user basis. Also, the Client caches all pages that it
receives from the TEK Server, so that future queries can first refer to
the local disk instead of having to search the Internet.
The
TEK Server, currently at MIT in Boston, USA, runs in a high-connectivity
site. The server would use the World Wide Web to find the most appropriate
set of content for each query, and to email the results back to the
client. A key feature of the TEK Server is that it uses a database to keep
track of each client and the pages that they have downloaded. Using this
information, the Server can often improve the quality of the
results.
For instance, if a Client has already downloaded a
given page, the Server will not waste bandwidth by sending it again;
instead, it will return an additional page that is relevant to the user’s
query.
The TEK Protocol manages all of the communication
between the Client and the Server. In many communities, email is not a
reliable medium for communication -- rather, emails can be delayed,
mangled, and lost. In these cases, it might be necessary for the Client to
re-send a search query, or for the Server to the search results. The TEK
Protocol keeps track of all messages that were sent and received by the
Client; if a certain amount of time passes without hearing back from the
Server, then the query is automatically resent.
Download of TEK:
An Alpha version of the
TEK Client is available for download. This version contains some known
bugs and is intended primarily for users who are willing to help test and
evaluate the software. There are versions of TEK available for both Linux
and Windows.
And those of you who are interested in helping
to fix bugs, wish to implement additional functionality, or contribute in
other ways to the TEK project, do e-mail the TEK systems design team at
tekadmin@mit.edu. The latest version of the TEK Client, is available for
download at http://cag.lcs.mit.edu/tek/TEKdownload.html. Also, for users
with limited connectivity, the software on a CD is currently available,
free of cost. You can ask for a copy by sending your request to tekadmin@mit.edu .
N S
Soundara Rajan
(The author wishes to acknowledge the help
and permission received from Bill Thies, thies@mit.edu, to write this
article) |
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
YOUTH HERALD
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