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The reason is simple. You don't need to do a lot of conceptual analysis when the typcial search query is two to three words long.
Take "books by children." What exactly is the by doing conceptually? Nothing. When Google drops it, you're getting stuff mainly about childrens books. Understanding by helps you know that you want not children's books but books BY children. But I don't need some big natural language to alter that. I just need to put all three words into quotes, and the "conceptual" query becomes clear.
Heck, AllTheWeb used to kick in auto phrase searching like this in the past. And if I want to do concepts, I could shove things like Clusty's topics up top.
Honestly, the Powertech story I've heard so many times before, including the reputable investors or others that are supposed to make you sit up and take notice (think Accoona and Bill Clinton as spokesperson -- that was only last year, and Accoona has gone nowhere).
Maybe I'll make the time to highlight some of the ones that pitched and disappeared over the years, becase Powerset pretty much sits right within that model. It's probably energy better spend other ways, however.
As always, I could be wrong. Powerset might be the right tech and the right tech. But it's such a well worn story. If they don't realize how many others have made this pitch already, that especially makes me wary that they're going to be successful at all.
It's primary use was to improve e-commerce sales, online service and support, and call center productivity.
According to IBM, iPhrase's technology is compliant with IBM's Unstructured Information Management Architecture. It will be used to help customers and partners discover inherent meaning from a wide variety of data.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
While the iPhrase purchase seems to fit in with IBM's information on-demand strategy, what's less clear is what the future will be for iPhrase's customer self-service applications.
BTW, IBM and Google were purportedly teaming up to provide search capabilities for corporate databases but I haven't heard much more on this for quite some time.
"Take, for example, if you type “Books by Children†into Google’s search box. Google essentially drops the word “by†and looks for all the pages that are relevant to “books†and “children.â€"
Because, Google gives: 3,530,000 results for "books for children" with " "
and for books for children with out " "
Google gives: 283,000,000 or 80 times more...
With the spreading of "natural language search" the searcher will be delivered from using Keywordese that implies that the weight to achieve "correct search results" will be on the Web Owners that will have to implement correctly the "natural language strings" in their sites.
If when you search for "Books by Children" and you see results from "Books on Children" it means that the Web Owner has not implemented its site in the best way.
Web owners will have to replace "keywords optimization" with "natural texts optimization".
If it is like that, then Google can sleep for a while...
Jac
I need a better example of google's failings, one that actually fails.
The list of failed search startups are long...
My advice is that Powerset, and other "alternative" search engines focus on enterprise search or specialized vertical search markets. Their unique technologies will be more appreciated and valued by those customers. If they are really stuck on doing consumer search than they should try to specialize in News Search, People Search, Medical Search, or some other vertical where their power can be an advantage.
I wrote an indepth blog on this subject today http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/...
Despite the enormity of the challenge, over-the-top predictions have been made since the 1950's about the imminent ability of computers to interpret natural language. This is why the term "artificial intelligence" ended up with a bad rep (though this has been tempered somewhat in recent years as computers have finally started to do some stuff which can reasonably be described as intelligent).
So it's certainly correct to be skeptical about Powerset's claims. It's much easier to understand language in a limited domain than in the wild, woolly world of the web, and I can easily imagine them wowing folks with a few canned queries that they know work well. This is very different from performing well in a real-world environment where people are entering all kinds of crud and expecting to get back useful results.
That said, it's always possible that these guys have found a clever way to achieve substantial improvement in search result quality using NLP, without having captured the Holy Grail of actually understanding queries and webpages, boiling them down to some formal semantic representation and matching them up on that basis (which frankly isn't possible today if for no other reason than that our computers aren't nearly powerful enough). If so, that's huge... Google huge. But I, for one, will believe it when I see it. :-)
If you want to prove the superiority of the tool, use some examples that have some strength to them, such as:
books about Jane Austen's depiction of clergy in the Georgian church
or
information useful in sizing the Asian market for "X" product
Creating robust search isn't (or shouldn't be) just about finding the best deal on a car or pulling up a corporate web site. Robust search needs to satisfy complex information queries as opposed to finding what will suffice.
Sorry on the delay. Wrote up my own post, then had to run for a flight to Frankfurt for the book fair over there. Hate to point over to my post by dropping a link, but it's the fastest way to get you to that list:
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061005-0...
I have been assisting the company to work with early adopters and power through the proof of concept phase - to see what users like and don’t like about our linguistic search technology AND I have experienced much of what you both are saying (regarding user search habits and the two-three word query)..
With that said, as soon as I show or tell these “typical users†to just ask the questions they want answered AND not worry about the breaking the engine with a longer more specific query, they quickly change their old habits… Also, you would be surprised how much relevant data is not being found by the common search engine, because those engines do not recognize the many other ways of saying that same two-three word concept…
You are correct to say that most what you hear about NLP and linguistic engines is a joke, but there are some of us that may have the foundation of where search needs to go…. Only time will tell and I would love to continue this discussion offline… BMASE
But where does it start? How is context created? Certainly not on some obscure Web-server out of thin air.
All these people trying to do NLP without breaking the Microsoft monopoly are just lying to the investors. You can get to context if you run your applications in context, which requires a different OS and different applications from what we have today. Which also requires a different way of writing applications and ....
Come on guys this is the 21th century, and you think in terms of the 18th century. Oh and if you really believe your brain does computable linguistic processing, please don't drive when I'm around.
NO.
Relevancy of results is not a problem the masses have with Google. If Powerset is playing the relevancy game they're seven years too late. Read Danny's post...
New users are less sophisticated than old ones, so if (of course this is a big *if*) Powerset really does crack the natural language barrier as well as offer results that are better than Google the shift to use it will be spectacularly fast. I'm floored how few seem to understand this.
Experiences users *will move* to the best search, and inexperienced will follow or already be there due to natural language advantages. It's that simple.
My Browser is: Opera.
Thank you.
The demo is available at http://www.bitext.com, Demos section; or at http://demos.bi...t.com/BOEBitext.
This demo runs with (the outstanding search engine) dtSearch. We plan to release soon another demo where we integrate our NLP software with MSN index and API.
For those of you with some competence in Spanish, please, try it and let us know.
Thanks,
Antonio
I.E. Personal communicators and Cars, etc.
Yours kindly,
Shakir Razak
[url=http://google.com]google[/url]
had a panicky moment when she took off her mask to clean it, and started simulating a drum in the water with both arms in that way that frightened people do.
Bye
I have couple of questions:
Who should we contact regarding finance issues for my new Conceptual Web Search Engine?
Is there a way to propose our technology to interested staff .
Thanks
W,Gharbiyeh CEO
GET-Jo
We love you
How I can change avatar in this forum?
http://allio.orcon.net.nz/1/
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