Google teaching computers to talk

(Google)

Google has been busy at the drawing board, figuring out how to teach computers to more thoroughly understand language and how synonyms can help computers return improved search results.

While they haven't even got close to perfecting the technique, their little baby is on the path to understanding the concept of how a search for "photos" can often benefit from including related synonyms such as "pictures."

According to Google's January 19 blog post, around 70 percent of user searches are affected by the use and inclusion of synonyms.

"Most of the time, you probably don't notice when your search involves synonyms, because it happens behind the scenes," wrote Steven Baker, software engineer at Google.

"However, our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym."

There are many cases where using synonyms in search is a very effective way to retrieve better results, but as Google admits, they still have a lot of work to do before their creation can fluently understand the intricacies of (over 100) languages and correctly identify the nuances of human thought processes.

Users wanting to turn off synonym search for a particular term can place a "+" in front of their search term. When searching for more than word, you can add quotation marks at either end of the group of words or phrase to exclude synonyms.