And so, the cat is back, after several months of nothing really special to write about. Don't you worry though; "no news, good news"!
I keep reading about new search engines that appear lately and some of them do sound interesting. I think it's time to close this connection in your mind where "Internet search" equals "Google", as I have two interesting ones:
The first one is Powerset : http://www.powerset.com . It accepts questions in natural language, such as "What is the population of Tokyo?" or "Where is Sapporo?". For now, it only searches Wikipedia articles. I tried feeding it a few more difficult questions, such as "Which voice actor plays the X role in the Y anime?" or "What is the effect of chocolate on blood pressure?" and it answered perfectly. I've already asked it more than a dozen of times and it's never disappointed me. Maybe the correct answer is second or third, but it's always there. One little drawback is that it cannot deal very well with synonyms - yet? Or am I asking for too much?
EDIT: Actually, Powerset can deal with synonyms as well, maybe it was just me picking a tough one. However, it's constantly progressing. Also, the Powerset staff is cool and they care about their product: I even had the honor of having them post comments on this very article!
The second one is Cuil - http://www.cuil.com . It uses context-relevant search rather than ranking pages according to number of visits - which means, if there are 100 pages relevant to your search, it will rank them according to how relevant it judges them to be rather than how many people visit them. This one is very promising, but its results are a bit disappointing for now - I certainly hope that they will improve their algorithm with time. For example, I was looking for the download page of a certain software, so I just typed "software_name download" and it didn't return the download page. However, I did like the way results are presented: tiled up in a grid, like magazine articles, rather than a list.
Last but not least, a small flash of my news: I've planned a holiday which is really about to start (countdown launched), but I hope to get back to you before I leave - this time with comments on Jigoku Shoujo, an anime I just started seeing. And, by the end of August, I might come up with a dissertation describing the relationship between the number of people staying in the same house and the entropy inside the house. However, that's going to be a difficult task, as it actually depends on each person involved!
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2 comments:
Where did you see problems with synonyms? Try a query like politicians who died from disease and click on "Advanced" and "Sort by sentence." Or, try who did microsoft buy? Our synonyms aren't perfect, but we're getting closer!
{mark} powerset product manager
Hello Mark! Glad to see you found my blog - how did you find it? Thanx for leaving your comment :)
The problem was in this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems
Until recently, there was a column as to whether a filesystem "murders your wife". A friend was trying to play with powerset and he asked it "does ext3 kill your wife?". No results were shown.
I still assume that the problem was with murder vs kill, but I couldn't reproduce it exactly since the column in question was removed. However, when I tried asking the questions, it couldn't tell me which filesystems kill my wife, but when I asked it about murdering my wife, it did return the article about Hans Reiser.
I like seeing developers caring about their product, it's the best guarantee that the product is good! Keep up the good work!
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