“IDGNS: What’s the status of semantic search at Google? You have said in the past that through “brute force” — analyzing massive amounts of queries and Web content — Google’s engine can deliver results that make it seem as if it understood things semantically, when it really functions using other algorithmic approaches. Is that still the preferred approach?

Mayer: We believe in building intelligent systems that learn off of data in an automated way, [and then] tuning and refining them. When people talk about semantic search and the semantic Web, they usually mean something that is very manual, with maps of various associations between words and things like that. We think you can get to a much better level of understanding through pattern-matching data, building large-scale systems. That’s how the brain works. That’s why you have all these fuzzy connections, because the brain is constantly processing lots and lots of data all the time.

IDGNS: A couple of years ago or so, some experts were predicting that semantic technology would revolutionize search and blindside Google, but that hasn’t happened. It seems that semantic search efforts have hit a wall, especially because semantic engines are hard to scale.

Mayer: The problem is that language changes. Web pages change. How people express themselves changes. And all those things matter in terms of how well semantic search applies. That’s why it’s better to have an approach that’s based on machine learning and that changes, iterates and responds to the data. That’s a more robust approach. That’s not to say that semantic search has no part in search. It’s just that for us, we really prefer to focus on things that can scale. If we could come up with a semantic search solution that could scale, we would be very excited about that. For now, what we’re seeing is that a lot of our methods approximate the intelligence of semantic search but do it through other means.”

I interpret these comments to mean that Google’s management still views the concept of semantic search (and the Semantic Web) as involving better understanding of the intended meaning of text in documents and queries. The W3C’s web of data model is still not on their radar.

We thought we’d see what HealthBase thought of the Semantic Web and it turns out that if you are experiencing the Semantic Web as a condition there are several recommended treatments.

and as a treatment itself, HealthBase is pretty positive.

• Information retrieval tasks on the Semantic Web
• Incentives and interaction paradigms for resource annotation
• Interaction paradigms for semantic search
• Semantic technologies for query interpretation, refinement and routing
• Modeling expressive resource descriptions
• natural language processing and information extractions for the acquisition of resource descriptions
• Scalable repositories and infrastructures for semantic search
• Crawling, storing and indexing of expressive resource descriptions
• fusion of semantic search results on the Semantic Web
• Algorithms for matching expressive queries and resource descriptions
• Algorithms and procedure to deal with vagueness, incompleteness and inconsistencies in semantic search
• Evaluation methodologies for semantic search
• Standard datasets and benchmarks for semantic search

See the full call for papers for more information.

BlindSearch is a simple and neat site that collects ‘objective’ opinions on search quality by showing query results from Google, Yahoo and Bing side by side without identifying which is which and inviting you to select the best.

“Type in a search query above, hit search then vote for the column which you believe best matches your query. The columns are randomised with every query.

The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results?”

As of this writing there have been 1679 votes for preferred results with Google getting 39%, Bing 39% and Yahoo: 22%.

update 2:14pm edt 6/7: Google: 45%, Bing: 32%, Yahoo: 22% | 11,130 votes

“In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software. How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things, you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.”

Of course, they know that this will make trying them irresistible to some of us. If that includes you, go get the Mac or Linux version.

• kate bush covers
• president twice
• president obama's birthday
• thread query language
• where the rose is sown
• capital of estonia
• boston to asheville
• 36 jfk street
• austin population
• primitons reissue
• ellen barkin buckaroo banzai picture

I sense form some of these queries that he is probing the systems where an advanced search engine can exploit a little bit of semantic knowledge. For example, recognizing that a user’s query “boston to asheville” matches a common pattern “ to “, and she probably is interested in information about how to travel from the first location tot he second. It seems like Google has been working on adding more such patterns, at least for the low hanging fruit.

Of course, if everyone hits on this site it may get throttled or blocked by either or both of the search engines. @Glen — would you be willing to share your code?

(spotted on hacker news) ]]> http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/06/01/bing-vs-google-side-by-side-comparison/feed/ 4 http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/04/26/google-flu-trends-web-searches-as-sensors/ http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/04/26/google-flu-trends-web-searches-as-sensors/#comments Sun, 26 Apr 2009 17:40:22 +0000 Tim Finin http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/?p=1838 Google has had a special “flu trends” site up for many months that provides “up-to-date estimates of flu activity in the United States based on aggregated search queries.”

They have found that how many people search for flu-related topics is a leading indicator for reports on how many people actually have flu symptoms. They believe that this metric “may indicate flu activity up to two weeks ahead of traditional flu surveillance systems”. Click on the flash video below to see the relationship between the flu searches and flu symptoms.

So, is Google magic? The explanation for why changes in in the level of flu searches precedes changes in the level of flu symptoms is more mundane.

“So why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.”

You can get the details in a recent article in nature:

J. Ginsberg, M. Mohebbi, R. Patel, L. Brammer, M. Smolinski and L. Brilliant, Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data, Nature 457, 1012-1014 (19 February 2009).

Of course, such leading indicators may not correlate well if there is a “black swan” flu epidemic or even if there is an unfounded fear of one. Sometimes the crowds are wise, but often not. Remember when we all thought technology stocks real estate was a good thing to invest in?

The Google site also allows you to look at the data by state as well. Click on the image below to try it out.

Today’s New York Times has an article, At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool, about how many search for information on YouTube first and turn to text search engines only when their YouTube results are inadequate.

“FACED with writing a school report on an Australian animal, Tyler Kennedy began where many students begin these days: by searching the Internet. But Tyler didn’t use Google or Yahoo. He searched for information about the platypus on YouTube.

“I found some videos that gave me pretty good information about how it mates, how it survives, what it eats,” Tyler said. Similarly, when Tyler gets stuck on one of his favorite games on the Wii, he searches YouTube for tips on how to move forward. And when he wants to explore the ins and outs of collecting Bakugan Battle Brawlers cards, which are linked to a Japanese anime television series, he goes to YouTube again.

While he favors YouTube for searches, he said he also turns to Google from time to time. “When they don’t have really good results on YouTube, then I use Google,” said Tyler, who is 9 and lives in Alameda. Calif.

The article reports that the number of YouTube searches now recently exceeded those on Yahoo, which had been number two.

“In November, Americans conducted nearly 2.8 billion searches on YouTube, about 200 million more than on Yahoo, according to comScore.”

You can see this trend in comScore’s December 2008 Search Engine Rankings report.

It’s hard to say where this is going. Video is great for some kinds of information (e.g, demonstrations, events) and less good for others (e.g., recipes, careful arguments). We can easily link information in text to related information, but can’t (yet) for videos. We can more easily write programs to process text and even extract semantic information from it.

But I have a feeling that nine year old Tyler Kennedy is a sign of things to come.

“I wish Google didn’t make me think of tentacles. It never did before I tried avoiding it for 24 hours — a doomed exercise that began as a challenge and morphed into a horror show.

This was supposed to be a birthday present to the Internet’s reigning brand — admittedly, an odd sort of gift for a company that so thrives on participation. Ten years ago today, on Sept. 7, 1998, Google was officially incorporated, beginning its historical march to ubiquity from a Silicon Valley garage. What better way to celebrate Google’s dominance — search, e-mail, chat, maps, news, calendars, Mars– than to abstain from its services entirely? ”