Comments on: Search: Simplicity and Information Don’t Mix

By: Stephen E. Arnold

Stephen E. Arnold — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:49:05 +0000

Transparency vs Simplicity The Noisy Channel,

Good. I am an addled goose and certainly less than qualified to comment about simplicity.

Stephen Arnjold, December 13, 2008

By: Transparency vs. Simplicity | The Noisy Channel

Transparency vs. Simplicity | The Noisy Channel — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 03:30:05 +0000

[...] I was a bit taken aback by a recent blog post in which Stephen Arnold seemed to attach the notion that an effective search engine could be [...]

By: sperky

sperky — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:42:58 +0000

I am reminded of tautologies (and other limitations) of hardware-software and that Google has stretched it most consistently the furthest. Then comes “soul of a new machine” Stephen Wallach with a different spin on field-programmable gate arrays and may produce hardware that might run different software or the same software differently – hardware with a different DNA. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/technology/business-computing/17machine.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Where will this put search, i wonder – or for that matter, Google – if, in fact, they are not already using this ?

By: CJ

CJ — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:59:28 +0000

And get this…in computing we always have to extend WordNet because it isn’t specific enough to every domain! Nice George Miller quote.

By: David Eddy

David Eddy — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:00:48 +0000

Fine article…

Here’s a comment on the complexity of language (“Ambiguous Words”) by Dr. George Miller, the father of WordNet.

A “simple” 13 word couplet generates 3.6 Trillion combinations. And that’s with
simple, short real words with an average of 10 meanings per word.

I’ve assembled a dictionary of 2,000 terms with 68,000 meanings… 34 meanings per term.

There’s also the “guess the word” game… known as “the vocabulary problem”
http://www.si.umich.edu/~furnas/Papers/vocab.paper.pdf

At BEST you have a 20% chance of guessing the right word.

By: CJ

CJ — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 16:33:10 +0000

Really lovely article, I enjoyed reading that very much.

Gerard Salton said that any good system should have an element of magic, hence calling his system “Salton’s Magical Automatic Retriever of Text”.

I’m finishing my PhD in Natural language generation and understanding, and have built conversational systems. I built chatbots to start with but the complexity of true NLG and U is phenomenal. Every time I think I have it sorted and turn a corner…there is a whole load more to learn.

This was a nice read also, from Anna Patterson on why building a search engine is hard.

http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=143

By: Stephen E. Arnold

Stephen E. Arnold — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:31:32 +0000

Andreas Ringdal,

The interface is what procurement teams see and understand. The interface is important. Often a great interface makes it easy for users to see the short comings of the plumbing otherwise hidden.

Stephen Arnold, December 1, 2008

By: Andreas Ringdal

Andreas Ringdal — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:28:02 +0000

@sasha The user interface is just the tip of the iceberg. Although the Cloudturner interface has some innovative ways of letting the users specify what parts of the search is important, a lot of search attempts fail long before any data reaches the users, even before it reaches the engines, and that is barely half the distance to get to the users.

Andreas

By: Stephen E. Arnold

Stephen E. Arnold — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:36:54 +0000

Sasha,

Thanks for your comment.

Stephen Arnold, December 1, 2008

By: sasha

sasha — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:29:45 +0000

History of past century shows that usage of technology don’t have to be complex,
Video, PC, Mobile phones were tough to operate once
Even creating complex queries can be made easy http://www.cloudtuner.com/websearch.swf
Same goes for non-textual infromation
http://www.cloudtuner.com/imagesearch.swf