The Future of Google Search and Natural Language Queries 148
eldavojohn writes "You might know the name Peter Norvig from the classic big green book, 'AI: A Modern Approach.' He's been working for Google since 2001 as Director of Search Quality. An interview with Norvig at MIT's Technology Review has a few interesting insights into the 'search mindset' at the company. It's kind of surprising that he claims they have no intent to allow natural questions. Instead he posits, 'We think what's important about natural language is the mapping of words onto the concepts that users are looking for. But we don't think it's a big advance to be able to type something as a question as opposed to keywords ... understanding how words go together is important ... That's a natural-language aspect that we're focusing on. Most of what we do is at the word and phrase level; we're not concentrating on the sentence.'"
This is awesome. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The problem with natural language searches... (Score:2, Funny)
lol easy, looser
:P
The capital of France (Score:5, Funny)
"That's easy! The capital of France is 'F'."
Re:natural language is an oxymoron (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What's really the story (Score:3, Funny)
Search Engine: Would you prefer woUser: NOW!!!
Search Engine: *sigh* As you wish...
Re:The problem with natural language searches... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm not really a language expert on either, but I'm tried to learn Japanese and its really tough.
Perhaps you should try and nail down English first. :)
Cheers,
-jdm
Re:natural language is an oxymoron (Score:3, Funny)
Dishwasher: CHANGE TO MODE POTS_AND_PANS
You: I ent dun nuffink!
Dishwasher: CANCEL RINSE CYCLE