Google says the answers lie in the individual
In an opinion piece published by the Financial Times on Friday, Peter Fleischer had this to say:
…the same words can have very different meanings to different people depending on their background and their interests. It is the same idea that is driving Google’s personal search service.
The bulk of his article focuses on the privacy issues of personalized search, which makes sense since Peter is actually Google’s Global Privacy Counsel. But I choose to focus on this perhaps deceptively obvious gem: that identical words can have totally different meanings depending on the user.
That conundrum lies at the core of the predictive search challenge: how can a search engine possibly hope to know what you’re looking for, if what you’re looking for can’t be decisively defined by words?
Google’s answer is, of course, history and demographics. VortexDNA’s approach is core purpose and values—first understand who you are, then use that as a filter. Are there other solutions out there? And do you have any opinions on what might be the best one?
May 30th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
I came via the ReadWrite Web comment you left on May 29th and to my amazement I read every post! I can tell you that don’t happen too often. In fact, I pretty sure its a first. Great work.
And, I am now officially excited about Web3.0. In this post, you talked about Google’s answer and VortexDNA’s answer. I would love to see a follow up post listing other solutions that you are aware of and the approaches they have taken.
Cheers!
May 30th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Hello Niall!
Thank you so much for your kind comments. I will absolutely continue to bring you information about additional solutions to predictive search. If you haven’t already read it, this post describes some of the efforts towards semantic search engines, which bring natural language comprehension and contextual processing to the search engines.
What is your reaction to the direction of these endeavors? Is there one that instinctively seems to make more sense?
I truly appreciate your readership.
Best regards,
Kaila Colbin
June 11th, 2007 at 11:49 am
[…] a post in which I had commented on Google’s and VortexDNA’s approaches to Web 3.0, a reader wrote in asking what other solutions are out […]