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

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.

Comments

Greeaaaaat...

[jenningsthecat]

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.

Does that mean that Google search results will continue to be less and less relevant at an ever-increasing pace? I already have to re-refine my searches over and over again, in a drain-swirling process of thwarting Google's hopelessly inept attempts to read my mind. And then all those re-queries I end up trying, result in that fscking Recaptcha thing - and I'm pretty much NEVER signed in to Google, so that process takes two, three, or more minutes, depending on how coy their 'anti-bot' algorithm is being at the time. At which point I either give it up, or have to fire up another browser instance just so I can keep soldiering on.

Fuck Google, fuck the horse they rode in on, and fuck their attempts at "answering questions with complete thoughts".