Why Google is the new Ludwig Wittgenstein

From Jason Kottke:

Steven Levy on how
Google’s search algorithm has changed over the years.

Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which
words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal
says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say,
‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that
told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also
learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning
semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”

But there
were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was
similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded
that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed
in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As
Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it
analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found
in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball
games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what
“hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type
‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if
you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”

Or in simpler terms, here’s a snippet of a conversation that Google
might have with itself:

A rock is a rock. It’s also a stone, and it could be a
boulder. Spell it “rokc” and it’s still a rock. But put “little” in
front of it and it’s the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark.
Unless Noah is around.

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