Re: Magic, Intelligence, and search engines
YUWONO BUDI (yuwono@uxmail.ust.hk)
Fri, 26 Apr 1996 00:20:55 +0800 (HKT)
>
> Right. Hear hear. People have been, since about 1975, saying "wouldn't
> it be wonderful if search engines were intelligent." And every couple
> of years, some little venture-cap-funded startup comes along and says
> "HUZZAH! We've made search engines intelligent!" If you believe
> in precision/recall [which might be useful if it could be measured]
> the numbers show a discouraging lack of progress in the last 20 years
> at making engines intelligent.
>
> Not that we don't make progress... but mostly on user interfaces,
> data structures & algorithms, feedback mechanisms, document strucures,
> indexing efficiency, distributed search.
>
> Why is all this? Because to be intelligent, the software would have to,
> for an arbitrary web page, be able to discern what it's about. In a
> multi-lingual fashion, at that. Such software does not currently exist.
I don't think that is the central issue. I'd say, to be truely
intelligent, the software would have to be able to understand
what the user wants based solely on his/her imprecise (typically,
due to the lack of means for expressing his/her information needs)
query.
Knowing what an arbitrary web page is about is only a small part
of the whole enterprise, IMO.
-Bud.