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February 17, 2007
More on pigeons and search
I have written previously that using "keywordese", the language of keywords used to query search engines today, is like using a "grunting pidgin language" instead of a human natural language to communicate our intent to the search engine. This also explained the joke on our Powerset Series A Funding Party t-shirts with the grunting pigeon.
In an unexpected confirmation of the connection between pigeons and keyword search technology, a reader pointed out to me an article on Google's website about Google's PigeonRank technology. 
This technology employs huge arrays of pigeons that are trained to peck at pages that are more likely to be high quality results. Although each pigeon is fallible, the wisdom of the crowds means that the results of the whole coop can have high quality.
So far, the PigeonRank technology appears to be applied only to rankings, not to query languages. But it is possible that such work is happening in secret.
Posted by barney at February 17, 2007 1:47 PM
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