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Opinion
Semantic Search: Could the Web Think?
7/16/2008
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Results from a Current Web Search
On the current Web, I did a quick search posing as someone who knows nothing about gardening and is searching for reasons either to try, or not to try, a garden. So, I typed in "Should I grow a garden?" and received a lot of links about what I should grow in my garden. In other words, my responses were begging the question.
So, I tried "Why should I grow a garden?" For this query, I got links that ignored the "why" in my query. Again, I found tips about growing a garden as if I'd already decided to garden actually knew a fair amount about soil testing and my local extension agent. My gardening novice persona still had no answer.
Then I tried "Benefits of growing a garden." The results told me "You get fresh vegetables," or "You are doing good for the planet," and "You can find peace while hoeing your garden." Still not really the answers I was looking for.
Finally, I tried "Reasons not to garden." My responses: "Five reasons not to move to New Jersey," and "Reasons not to own a cat," and "Reasons not to hate winter." (These examples are all taken from real search results!)
This was going nowhere. I didn't know how to ask the right question (using advanced search only showed that my specific question is not answered anywhere on the Web).
Somehow I would have had to guess the particular terms and phrases someone might have used in a paper or posting that would help me decide if I wanted to put any effort into learning about gardening. Finding the meaning I needed would be a long process given the current state of search.
To Search Semantically, You Need Ontologized Content
Of course, it's not just the search engines that are failing my gardening novice persona. The Web now grabs anything that is posted to it, no matter how the resource is rhetorically organized. So, it's really no surprise that from this grab bag of millions of potential links I didn't find a single match to the meaning of my query. No matter how smart the search engine, it can't do a good job searching uncharacterized and undefined content.
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