The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives Search Baloney

August 17, 2016

I am quite skeptical about the results a free Web index presents when I look for information. I don’t want to single out any of the towering giants of Web search as spoofers, charlatans, and snake oil vendors but those ads and the quest for money are Job One.

I read “Why Poets Can Make Better Search Engines.” You may be able to access this write up for free or maybe not. A real journalistic outfit created the confection.

The idea is that search engines have to have the ability to form more poetic thoughts about what a user’s query “means.” I learned:

Artificial intelligence and machine intelligence are about decreasing the length of human perception. Google autocomplete is an attempt to shorten the time and path between thought and a response — to decrease the time and path between seeing something and categorizing it or identifying it and moving on.

The person making this statement is offered by a person working on Kensho, which is described as:

essentially a search engine for economic events and data.

Dig out your copy of Percy Bysshe Shelly’s collected poems. Use them as models for improving precision in recall in search. How exactly? Not important. As ee cummings wrote:

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

Got it.

Stephen E Arnold, August 17, 2016

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