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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 we 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 my 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 the following categories: Human Language Technology , Search
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