Search engine

A 26-year-old PhD student from the University of New South Wales has patented a new way of exploring the web.

Ori Allon’s so-called Orion search engine is designed to complement searches conducted on services such as Google, Yahoo or MSN Search.

Search engines find pages on which keywords occur. Sometimes these pages are important to the topic. Other times they are not.

Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the key word so the user can pick the most relevant.

"The results to the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts, giving you the relevant information without having to go to the website - although you still have that option if you wish," said Israeli-born Allon, who completed a Bachelor and Masters degree at Monash University in Melbourne before moving to UNSW for his PhD.