Comments on: Semantic search vs Google: In Medicine

By: jose lister

jose lister — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 06:17:20 +0000

Oh, and that was not intended to be an emoticon in my last post, but the concluding parenthesis.

By: Y.S.

Y.S. — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:56:54 +0000

I used to use answers.com

By: Bertalan Meskó

Bertalan Meskó — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:31:13 +0000

Diane, I’m looking forward to your feedback.

Hilary, thank you for the long explanation. Now I think I understand it better.

By: Diane Michel

Diane Michel — Wed, 28 May 2008 00:52:27 +0000

I am most eager to give PowerSet a try for medical research purposes. Thank you for your posting. I will also give your personalized medical search a try!

Thanks

By: Hilary

Hilary — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:12:34 +0000

Oh, and that was not intended to be an emoticon in my last post, but the concluding parenthesis.

By: Hilary

Hilary — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:11:02 +0000

Hi Bertie,
I think I disagree with your statement that “The main idea [of the semantic web] is to ask questions”. I think it has nothing to do with the way queries are phrased (e.g. “discoverer of penicillin” vs. “who discovered penicillin?” vs. “penicillin discovery”) and everything to do with realizing that language is full of synonyms and that words have relationships to other words. Semantic search has the potential to change search in the same way that the use of stemming algorithms in search engines did. Stemming algorithms reduce words to their root, so “fishing”, “fished”, and “fishes” all reduct to the same word “fish”. This means that if you want to find about fishing the Hudson river, you don’t need to search on “fishing hudson river”, “fish hudson river”, etc. Rather than strict word matching, most search engines allow you some leeway in your queries and give you results that you perhaps didn’t explicitly ask for, but are clearly relevant.

A semantic search engine would be able to “understand” that “discoverer” and “inventor” mean essentially the same thing in the context of penicillin and return results not just for “discover penicillin” but also pages that match “inventor penicillin” etc. A semantic search engine might also display results about benzylpenicillin and phenoxymethylpenicillin (which are types of penicillin) or “beta-lactam antibiotics” even though the word “penicillin” is not a matched word in the document.

By: Luigi

Luigi — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:31:49 +0000

I have been in this business for so long, since the web started in 1993, you had to use a browser called Mosaic, and I am the least impress from the lack of intelligence on the search engines. But just recently Yahoo launched their drop down search which completes sentences as to search terms, still I like the idea of asking questions, and I thought Ask Jeeves was taking the lead on that. There are so many useless search results, and I know google is implementing better algorithms to filter out forcing search results to produce meaningless queries. I think the question strategy allows to narrow results, way to go!

By: ICMCC Newspage » Blog Archive » Semantic search vs Google: In Medicine

ICMCC Newspage » Blog Archive » Semantic search vs Google: In Medicine — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:07:33 +0000

[...] The main idea is to ask questions instead of search for terms. Let’s give it a try.” Article Bertalan Meskó, ScienceRoll, 26 May [...]

By: Deepak

Deepak — Mon, 26 May 2008 20:41:30 +0000

I have mostly been unimpressed with Powersets results. Too unpredictable in quality, and limited indexing capability (and scaling will be hard since NLP is expensive). I like the UI and believe it supplements traditional links, based search.

Where Powerset will do well is if it is searching structured information. Its results when using Freebase especially are quite decent.