10 Details About How Google Handles Natural Language Search
Google has posted a thought-provoking piece to the Official Google Blog, discussing at length, Google's system for understanding synonyms in search. As author Steven Baker says, "An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers."
Google considers understanding human language to be one of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence, and the key to returning the best possible search results. While it is far from perfect now, Google has invested a great deal of time into this (5 years of research to be exact).
To cut to the chase, here are some things pertaining to Google's handling of synonyms that you should keep in mind:
