Hissingsid - 9:09 am on Dec 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

if the keyword were TV(not my industry), then I would expect to see infomation on how TV's are made, history of the TV, veiwing habbits, Nelson ratings, etc.

Hi Newebmaster,

The Ontology contains semantic variations of words together with closely linked words and phrases and it understands that some words have completely different meanings for that word. In the paper it gives the example of Java. Java can be a programming language, an Island or a coffee. So it has rules that say if it is linked to these words, program, script, code etc it must mean the programming language and it can then look for other words and phrases, for which it has rules which are associated with programming languages.

The point is that it understands words and phrases and which ones are most stronglt linked but it does not understand the subject nor can it nake a subjective decision on what is a good page on that subject or a bad one.

The way that I visualise what it turns a search term into it is a bit like those ball and spring models of molecules. With a small number of closely linked balls (atoms) at the middle and other atoms floating around with weaker bonds both to the nucleus and to each other. It then looks for pages that seem to have those molecules (patterns of words) in them. It decides that a page is the right material if it is made up of molecules that match the model that it has created from the search term. I suspect that ranking is based on links to and from other pages that are made of the same material.

If the page has too much nucleus ie repitition of the exact keywords it is too dense and does not look like the model that has been extracted from the Ontology. If it does not contain the exact term searched for it may be abetter match than one that contains too many of the actual term searched for because the search is now looking to match the whole molecule like model and not just those keywords.

If anyone thinks that I'm barking up the wrong tree pleae say so. I'm just going to search for barking up the wrong tree to see if it thinks I want pages on lumber extraction or commonly used English expression. Well it got that one right in the organic results but Adwords is another matter ;)

Best wishes

Sid

Wrote in a hurry appologies for any gramatical and punctuation errors.