Google has managed to buy an algorithm that promises to change the way search engines will work in the future

Orion is the software made by an Australian student from New South Wales University by the name of Oli Allon.

The software was developed by Oli during his PhD on the university’s School of Computer Science. There, Dr Eric Martin was working on a project to develop a better search engine, so Oli attended his project. After six months, the ream announced the born of Orion, the search engine that will revolutionize the Internet.

“I provided the spark,” Dr Martin said last year, “but it is Ori who developed this through his amazing creativity and sheer hard work.”

The university took the formula to the US, and now Mr Allon is working out of Google’s head office in California. But because of confidentiality agreements, all the university can do is confirm that Mr Allon is a Google employee. Further more, the university retains the intellectual property rights, and that could mean a steady flow of royalty payments if the process is eventually integrated into Google’s search engine.

But what makes Orion so special?

Orion finds pages with content strongly related to the key word entered in the search. It then returns a section of those pages, and lists other topics related to the key word so users can pick the most relevant. The results of the search are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts, giving the searcher the relevant information without having to go to the website. So instead of checking every page to see if that website has what you want, the relevancy can be found on the text that the search engine finds.

It seems that the university had talks with Yahoo and Microsoft also, but they decided for Google.