[Sigia-l] Tilde for synonym search in Google

[Ed Housman]

The way the expand operator SHOULD work is for the system to
look at all the words in the "top" hits hits, then find among
these a small set of other words those that occur in many
times in those hits, focusing on rare words.  (So entering
Russia should return Moscow, Putin, Kremlin, etc.)  Then,
somehow you have to pick the hottest of those new words
and add them to the search.  The ranked results bring up 
new possibly relevant information, more wide-ranging than
the original search.  Of course if the user enters several
words in the search, the very top hits should be the ones that
have ALL those words.

Since the method is statistical you sometimes get some strange
hits among the good ones due to accidental co-occurrences in
alien contexts.

The most interesting full text search system was Personal
Librarian.  I purchased version 0.1 way back in the 70's
and kept upgrading until it was sold to AOL about 5 years
ago.  I still use the Windows version to find items in large
files, and it has an expand operator that shows you what new
words it found to be highly correlated to your query word
or phrase.

I recently installed Personal Librarian at our local historical
society to search transcripts of interviews with over 300 old
timers about what it was like in the island back then.   They
love it.

Also, I'm using it as the "card catalog" for a collection of
books in our local Hebrew Center.

It is easy to use, like Google, and works fine in the lastest
versions of Windows. It was extremely reliable, but alas, it
is not being updated and will eventually fade away.  It is 
a gem in the history of Information Science.

--Ed   




		
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