Minding the Planet: Associative Search and the Semantic Web: The Next Step Beyond Natural Language Search

Description

Our present day search engines are a poor match for the way that our brains actually think and search for answers. Our brains search associatively along networks of relationships. We search for things that are related to things we know, and things that are related to those things. Our brain not only searches along these networks, it senses when networks intersect, and that is how it finds things. For example, consider the case where you cannot remember someone's name. How do you remember it? Usually we start by trying to remember various facts about that person. By doing this our brains then start networking from those facts to things that they intersect. Through this process of "free association" or "associative memory" we home in on things which eventually trigger a memory of the person's name. Keyword search is a very weak approximation of associative search because there really is no concept of a relationship at all. By entering keywords into a search engine like Google we are simulating an associative search, but without the real power of actual relationships between things to help us. Google does not know how various concepts are related and it doesn't take ...

Original URL

http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2008/05/associative-sea.html

http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2008/05/associative-sea.html