What Problem Does Natural Language Search Solve?
from the just-wondering dept
Matt Marshall recently posted a story about a new search engine looking to raise a lot of money at a very high valuation, which has created quite a bit of buzz as people argue over whether or not the company has a chance, or deserves such a high valuation. Matt followed up with more details on the company, though he still expresses some reasonable skepticism. Like many people, my first reaction on hearing about it was that I can't remember a year that's gone by without someone claiming to have come out with a revolution in natural language search. However, when it comes to search engine news, no one can go through the history and explain why something is a bad idea quite like Danny Sullivan can. He lists out all the attempts at natural language search, and shows how each one failed (in some cases, miserably). He also points out that the problem with natural language search is that it requires everyone to change their behavior. As with any startup, when you're looking at their chances, the big question to ask is pretty simple: what problem does it solve? Plenty of people have figured out how to search with keywords. In fact, many of us find it more natural and faster than trying to construct a natural language query. So, while all the natural language search engines that come along insist that searches suck because they can't understand the the searcher, it's not clear that's the real problem. When people want to use a search engine, they want to find what they want. That means being able to search quickly. Dumping two or three keywords into a box is always going to be a lot faster than figuring out the natural language equivalent. So, perhaps someone can enlighten us. What is the problem natural language search solves?
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I used to support a natural language search produc
I am in the Nth grade and I want to do a research paper for school about the florida manatee.
[gets back irrelevant results]
research on the florida manatee
[better, but still poor results]
manatee.
[this was the last query.... seems they were forced pretty quickly to keyword searching....]
I always thought that the real need for applied technology was not in search, but in helping the user flush out their real question.
-E
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For e.g.
I want to find out why pres bush is ineffective... with the key word search, search engine will spit out all the pages with bush and ineffective which might not contain the answer to my quesitons... on the other hand, a natural language search engine will give me the pages which has the information about why bush presidency is not working even if the pages doesn't have bush and ineffective in them
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We definitely need something better than what we h
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My attempt to bypass keywords
If you type in "isohunt" and then click on the "similar sites" link, you get other bittorrent sites. A normal keyword search just brings up pages that have "isohunt" in them.
That said, it's mainly good for finding one trick pony or category killer sites. Not very good at answering complex questions.
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natural language search
Consider:
Who coined the word biogas?
Who was active in the energy field during 1972?
What was the first civilian grassroots resource organization in Montana focused on energy?
Why does poverty still exhist today?
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dot dot dot
Clearly because the public education system has failed you.
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RE: dot dot dot
and clearly because someone made a spelling or grammar mistake that proves without a doubt that they are a complete imbecile unworthy of ever posting anything online.
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Re: RE: dot dot dot
--Glenn
8]
P.S. 'tain't worth gettin' bothered about much, bro'. And yes, both and a number of other vernaculars are natural to me.
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RE: dot dot dot
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Autonomy?
Autonomy does that. We implemented that in our company... good stuff.
They can even read the contents of video and audio files and index the words spoken in the files. Imagine being able to jump right to the spot where the words were spoken is a video or audio file... Autonomy can do that.
Their customers:
Sun Microsystems
Telecom Italia
Her Majesty's Customs & Excise
XEXCO
Harrah's
AXA
Henkel
Sybase
Napster
Oracle
Compuware
Olympus
HSBC
ARM
Taylor & Francis
Federal Express
US State Department
Nissan Motor
Milward Brown Precis
Federal Government of Canada
UK Home Office
Her Majesty's Customs & Excise
Hutchison 3G
Harvard Business School
Philips
Britvic Softdrinks
MOL
T-Mobile
Macmillan Publishing
Allianz Life Insurance Co
Swiss Army
Parliament of Singapore
AstraZeneca
VMS
Singapore Police Force
Sony Music
GSA Advantage!
Kaiser Permanente
Nestle
Stanford Business School
Johns Hopkins
Wachovia
Standard Life Insurance
Raytheon
Commerzbank
Allstate Insurance
State of Washington
Napa Valley County
Texas Department of Transportation
American HomePatient
MOL
TIBCO
Sharper Image
General Motors
BBC
Philips
Xerox
Hutchison 3G
Sun Microsystems
Interwoven
America Online
Lockheed Northrop Grumman
Dow Chemical Company
Ericsson
Draeger Medical
Sutter Health
Kenyan AIDS Clinic
General Electric
University of Washington
State of Minnesota
World Wildlife Fund
Most are leaders in their space... they cant all be wrong.
Google can learn something from these folks.
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What would be ideal would be if a search engine would match up the search term/phrase used with the keywords in the resulting page of a successful search. The next time somebody enters a similar search phrase, those pages that answered the first user’s query would be given more weight to the second user. It would involve somehow guessing if a search was successful or not, which may or may not be possible.
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The real issue
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What it solves
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Re: What it solves
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I am quite at home using the more advanced search features of most search engines to pull out the specific details I am interested in, but my parents wade through pages and pages of crap trying to get to the document they are looking for. This is good for google et al. because the user is exposed to more ads, but only because of a failure of their interface to serve anything but the most primitive queries for the general user.
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Natural Language? Naturally!
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Yahoo and MSN VS Google
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