Seventeen-year-old Nicholas Schiefer has created a micro-search algorithm that makes it easier to find what you're looking for on the web.
If you've ever tried to search social media sites, you know how hard it is to get accurate results. Well, thanks to 17-year-old Canadian high school student, Nicholas Schiefer, that problem could soon be a thing of the past. Schiefer won the gold medal at the recent Canada-Wide Science Fair for his invention Apodora, a program that uses a special micro search algorithm that analyzes sentence context "to discern and exploit the relationships between words so people can get better search results."
According to The Globe and Mail, Schiefer created Apodora, which is named "after a python species with extraordinary search capabilities" by using linear algebra and discrete math. He's yet another example of teens, like the three high school winners of this year's Google Science Fair, who are embracing science and technology and inventing things that solve real-world problems.
The teen inventor, who is working for IBM Canada this summer, has garnered such a reputation as a genius that his peers have dubbed him the "next Mark Zuckerberg." However, Schiefer isn't sure they're really that similar. What Zuckerberg, he says, "managed to create very well was a desire." But, "we already have the desire to search. The technology is trying to catch up to what people expect."
So will Google snap up Apodora? Schiefer's still not sure what's going to happen with his invention. "It's a science fair project" he says. If this is what he's inventing in high school, it's going to be pretty interesting to see what he comes up with next.
Photo via 123rf.com
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