What Men and Women Want Most

Siri is fun to play with – ask her what the meaning of life is sometime – but I am still not sure she offers real, usable information that a quick internet search wouldn’t give me, and I wouldn’t have to repeat three times. However, people like Tim Berners-Lee dream of a time when you could ask inocuious questions like where to take your spouse for dinner and receive a response based on natural language processing and what I call insight. Insight into the food preferences of both you and your spouse, restaurants nearby and their table availability. The latter two are not as difficult, but insight would be an achievement that most men would like to possess on their own.

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Social Media Rumble

The two giants of social media have always been Facebook and Twitter. A recent change on Facebook’s part looks an awful lot like a Twitter tradition. Looking to improve its search and indexing capabilities, Facebook is now adding the hashtag symbol. Admittedly, many users have brought that habit with them from Twitter but for it to be embraced by the rival giant is interesting, to say the least.

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The Knowledge Graph Approach

Last year Google released Knowledge Graph, a database of over 570 million items of information. This was their demonstration of what a semantic search engine and structured data could bring to the table.

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Semantic Search Delivers

Ontology Systems is preparing to release a new version of their semantic search platform. Visitors to the Mobile World congress in Barcelona received a sneak preview of Project Rothko.

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Internal Search Should Not Be Overlooked

Search and search strategy are common topics across the world of technology, retail, and the Internet. But what about on your own intranet? Much is said and written about search optimization for the external sites, but ensuring that your own staff can find information to serve your customers is just as important.

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Inverted Files, Parsing, Discovery, and Clustering

Last time, I told you that inverted files and Boolean are basic to most or all search. So, what we have is the inverted file – that big alphabetical list of all the terms and where they came from – and a way to combine them. At the end of the day, no matter which direction you come from on the high end and even higher presentation levels, you are depending on these two to make it work. If you add that taxonomy to that, you are strengthening the use of your terms.

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Kinds of Search

There are search systems that are advertised as keyword search. There are ones that say that they are Bayesian. There are ones that are Boolean. There are ones that are primarily ranking algorithms.

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