Sunday, 25 February - 16:49 Category: Commentry

How to Improve Google

SYNOPSIS: How can search engines become more human? I have two suggestions both of which are probably impossible.

Why is it that my wife has an uncanny ability to find things on the Internet that I can't. I truly cannot explain it. Well, I can I just don't want to admit that I (a seasoned Internet professional who professes to be a marketing guru) am bested by my wife who works in public sector management!

The truth is, I have never been that great at finding information and I'm sure there are people out there who sympathise with me. I may be wrong here and perhaps some SEO specialist will beat me to a pulp on this point but search engines only index what people write. (Yes, yes, I know, metatags, blah, blah. But really, if I've written something specific on "Internet marketing pubs and hotels on the Shetland Islands" that's not going to be in the metatag, it's going to be in the body of the webpage.)

The problem I am alluding to here is that we all express things in different ways. You may describe the weather as "a rainy day" and I may describe it as "a miserable day". The fact is we're both referring to the same situation but if Google was to index our thoughts on the day, because there is no keyword similarity, they wouldn't show up together.

I am, of course, proposing the impossible. I am suggesting that the search engines identify the meaning from the keywords. This would mean them understanding the context of what is written and not just the keyword or phrase. Actually, there is a sort of pseudo-intelligence that the search engines use to do something similar -- it's called Latent Semantic Indexing. What it means is that there are real world relationships between words. For example, if you type in "Hula Hoop" there is a natural relationship to Hawaii. The search engines understand this and may present you with websites on Hawaii.

I think this is a problem that every Information System Analyst comes up against daily. If we only had one way of expressing something our searches will deliver pinpoint accuracy. However, the more flexible the system (and websites are 100% flexible) the more variation will be evident and consequently the less accurate the search.

To be honest, I would like to get to a point where I can type into Google "how many people surfed the Internet last month?" and get the right answer. (Just type that in and see what you get!) Let's face it, we ask questions using natural language and when we get on the Internet we have a question already formed in our minds we need the answer to.

What I'm getting at here is that in order for the the search engines to move to the next generation they need to respond more like human. The two steps to this process are; 1) allow us to type in natural language questions and 2) have a thorough understanding of context in order to identify when the same thing is being expressed in different ways.

Note to Google; no rush, do it well, tomorrow would be fine!

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Posted By:Jed Wylie on Sun, Feb 25th 2007, 16:49