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October 11, 2006
We are all natural language searchers
My Powerset CoFounder, Lorenzo
Thione has written a nice article on his blog, in which he argues that
are all natural language searchers.
He surveyed the underlying themes in much of the criticism in the current
blogstorm about Powerset and natural language search. Lorenzo groups the
arguments in support of keyword search into three clusters:
- The vast majority of queries are only a few words long
- There is only so much semantic intent that one could extract from
queries such as “Britney Spears”, “beach”, or “digital cameras” - Whether or not one could build a better search engine is a moot
point. Delivering better results to queries formulated in natural language won’t work, because it would require users to change their behavior.
Lorenzo’s article addresses each of these points in turn, and it is good
reading so I won’t summarize all the key points here. I particularly like
his response to the “most queries today are short” critique. He introduces
the idea of the long tail of failed queries, in which users initially
try more natural queries stating what they want, but eventually learn that
it doesn’t help with the search, so they shorten the queries, which leads to
the observation that most queries today are short. It’s a bit like looking
at the fact that all Model-T cars were black, after Henry Ford decided
that’s all he would give them, and concluding that there was no market for
colorful cars. As Lorenzo says:
The data so far about short queries and past failures of natural language
attempts is no indication about what users will really do or not do, as
users have never yet been presented with the possibilities of true natural
language search.
Combining this with my previous post on
vision of natural language search, this gives a good view of our
perspectives on what we think is obvious: that users will ultimately want to
interact with search engines in natural language, not just keywordese.
Posted by barney at October 11, 2006 2:42 pm
This entry was posted in Human Language Technology, Search
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