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Google's New Book Search Deals in Ideas, Not Keywords (axios.com)

Posted by msmash on from the interesting-moves dept.

A new Google project called called "Talk to Books" provides answers to questions by drawing on a library of more than 100,000 books. From a report: Tech pioneer Ray Kurzweil debuted the project at the TED conference in Vancouver, and explained that it differs from traditional search by relying on semantics rather than keywords. Keyword search is great when you're hunting down a specific piece of information, but Google -- and digital technology in general -- still has a long way to go when it comes to connecting ideas and answering questions with complete thoughts.

1 of 16 comments (clear)

  1. any good demonstrations of that? by ooloorie · · Score: 4, Informative

    All the results I get from this "idea based search engine" could simply be based on smart query term expansion.

    For example, when I say "List some lovers of Casanova.", all I get is a list of books related to Casanova.

    So, are there good examples of queries that actually demonstrate a deeper understanding of books by this new search engine?