How Search Engines Deliver Results Pages - Learning the Language
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So far I’ve talked about matters that relate to the way search engines index and rank what their web crawlers find. What about the whole reason search engines perform these tasks – query processing? That brings us to semantics, the science of language. Search engines use what they know of semantics to make intelligent matches to queries. This is why, for example, when a searcher puts in the phrase “vintage automobile,” the search engine might return, in addition to pages with that phrase, other pages that don’t have that phrase anywhere on them – but do feature the phrase “antique car.”
How do they do it? They sift through lots of data, and can form theories about relationships based on the frequency of use of terms and how often certain words show up together throughout the Internet. What this means is that, the more data search engines gather, the more accurate they will become. Long time users of search engines need only reflect on their own experience to see that they have improved significantly over the past five or ten years. The rate of improvement is accelerating, too, as search engines continue to spider more data.
We can look forward to search engines continuing to improve their understanding of users’ queries in the future. Meaning and intent can still be tricky to derive (“apple” doesn’t always mean the computer company; it can mean the fruit or even the music company). But even that problem should be surmountable in time.
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