eldavojohn writes "You might know the name Peter Norvig from the classic big green book, "AI: A Modern Approach." Well, he's been working for Google since 2001 as Director of Search Quality. The short interview at MIT's Technology Review has a few interesting questions but some of the answers are predictable. It's kind of surprising that he claims they have no intent to follow Ask in the ability to ask 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. Typing "What is the capital of France?" won't get you better results than typing "capital of France." But understanding how words go together is important. To give some examples, "New York" is different from "York," but "Vegas" is the same as "Las Vegas," and "Jersey" may or may not be the same as "New Jersey." 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. We think it's important to get the right results rather than change the interface." Norvig is a fairly brilliant man, I wonder how much his addition to their team has influenced their success? He's dead on in the interview when he says that it would be stupid for them to change the Google search engine interface." Link to Original Source
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