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.'"

Comments

Re:phrase/sentence?

[harmonica]

A phrase is part of a sentence. WP

Re:natural language is an oxymoron

[pluther]

"Why did World War I start" or "what does a duck eat" are questions that require too much understanding and explanation of the concepts.

Not at all. I do that kind of question in Google all the time.

Googling for "Why did World War I start" brings up, as the first result, an article titled "The Causes of World War I".

Followed by a few million more hits if that one isn't good enough.

And the question "What does a duck eat" gets many hits as well. The first one has, in the summary:

Ducks in the wild eat a variety of plants, insects, and native foods that will differ from...

I know it's just picking out keywords from the query and matching them to the sites, not trying to parse the natural language, but it works pretty damn well.