The Future of Google Search and Natural Language Queries

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.'"

Google and Asimov's fictional Multivac

[dpbsmith]

Isaac Asimov's fictional Multivac was a huge computer with some near-universal knowledge database that answered natural-language questions, giving Asimov all sorts of opportunities to present philosophical conundrums as entertaining short stories.

In the 1960s and thereabouts, when I used to hack around on minicomputers, but personal computers weren't well known to the general public, I always found it difficult to explain what computers did. One of their commonest questions was "Well, how does it work, do you type in questions and does it answer them?" Programming in assembly language didn't really fit that description.

Many technological fantasies seem to remain surprisingly distance. I tried ViaVoice and gave up: it's not a "voice typewriter." Roomba is not a general-purpose housekeeping humanoid-form robot, and neither are the machines that weld automobile chassis.

However, it seems to me that Google is within striking distance of Asimov's "Multivac" fantasy.

Incidentally, if you type in queries as complete sentences Google seems to do any worse than if you don't. Sort of the converse of adventure games, where one begins by typing "Walk over to the table on the left and pick up the silver key with your left hand" and quickly learns to use telegraphic style: "Go table. Take key."

Re:natural language is an oxymoron

[porcupine8]

I would find the drop-down suggestions a lot more useful if I could read more than the first two words. As I type in, for example "Chicago dog boarding" all I see is a list of "Chicago do... " I'm sure there must be a way to make the search space take up more of the toolbar (I don't really need that much room in the URL space, since most URLs that long are nonsense), but I don't know how and I don't really want my browser window to be the width of my screen.

Real questions ...

[foobsr]

Typing "What is the capital of France?" won't get you better results than typing "capital of France." ... Most of what we do is at the word and phrase level; we're not concentrating on the sentence. We think it's important to get the right results rather than change the interface.

This misses situations like searching for "That sf-short-story were the crew of the visiting spaceship is given a dog as a present" in which googling failed, at least for me, or, more technically, when you have absolutely no idea about what the relevant terms within the outcome might be. In short, if you have a real question.

CC.

Re:What's really the story

[Alt_Cognito]

Bah, the engine just has to ask refinement questions. Of course, this could be interesting:

User: Who is the winningest coach in football?
Search Engine: Did you mean, What coach has the most wins in football?
User: Yes
Search Engine: Did you mean American football?
User: Yes
Search Engine: NFL NCAA CFL...?
User: Umn, all of the above
Search Engine: Are you sure?
User: What?
Search Engine: Are you sure you want to compare all years, after all, NFL rules significantly changed in 2001, and leagues are not comparable...
User: Yes.. Yes, please compare them all....
Search Engine: You know winningest isn't a word right? .... And so on and so forth...