Posted on January 20, 2010 9:40 am
Google has revealed that its search engine will use synonyms to find what a user is looking for in the majority of cases.
Steven Baker, software engineer at the firm, stated on the Google blog that 70 per cent of searches across more than 100 languages will be affected by the use of a synonym.
He remarked that the problem which can occur in about one in every 50 cases is that the computer will use a "truly bad synonym" and a user will not get the benefit of efficient SEO services.
Mr Baker pointed out that often, a word or acronym can have two or more very different meanings which a computer struggles to sensibly decide between – so while GM may be "genetically modified" to many people, the search engine may have 20 other meanings for it.
"We can write a computer program to beat the very best human chess players, but we can’t write a program to … understand a sentence with anywhere near the precision of even a child," he explained.
Last week, Google launched a Person Finder tool to help people looking for loved ones after the Haiti earthquake.
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