Is the future of search about technology? ~ WHY SEO MATTERS
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Thursday 17 September 2009

Is the future of search about technology?

Or is it about language? The more I examine the results thrown up by search engines, I become increasingly convinced it is more about language. The reason I believe so is a simple observation of how G00GLE, for example, decides on relevance of information. What I mean is that I have had high results for search terms that are not really relevant to my site. The parser had simply found the three or four words in the query in close proximity to each other and decided that this was one of the most relevant answers available. In fact it could not have been further from the truth. Yes it found the words but what did it not find - the context. And this is the main problem, I believe, with search engine technology, it cannot interpret context and that is a crucial matter for finding the correct response to a query.
This, incidentally, is the issue which has plagued the world of automatic translation since its inception as a science. Understanding context. Now I mentioned in the previous paragraph that the parser had simply found the words in close proximity - something which search engines make use of when looking at a web page - the language before and after the keyword which was input. Machine or automatic translation has tried the same techniques in attempting to understand context but this has not been blessed with success.
I think we must face the truth that human lanuage is infinitely more complex than we first realised when we embarked upon ambitous projects in getting computers to translate human language. This remains the barrier with search technology and it is a barrier which will be hard to oversome.

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