TheWhippinpost - 2:02 am on Feb 11, 2007 (gmt 0)

I think "synonyms of phrases" gets a bit too far away from the idea.

Hence why I quoted it Jim... I used "synomyn" because that's how people generally began to describe the words LSI outputted, when in fact it's more about discovering unique words that are most likely to be found together (a very simple summary, obviously), these aren't synomyns you necessarily find in the dictionary.

So you end up coming out of that process with a few words that one could expect to see when flirting around another particular word... a related word(s), ya might say.

... or a predictive word; or even an expected word!

I've played a lot with the tilde (~) operator over time and know the algo can "relate" a brand-name to a manufacturer-name. It has also learnt to relate acronyms to it, as well as others.

To expand that to encompass a series of words, instead of just one, would be just a maths and computational exercise, I would'a thought... and we all know about BD.

Assuming pages in a single directory are somewhat related and maybe interlinked, that would -- or can -- fit MHes's definition of a "cluster of pages".

I'd go further than that: The calculation will be made across a cluster of documents it has already judged to fall within the area of interest - which might even be the number of documents it says it found on the SERP.

This won't be just your site, or directory, though clearly if you have a good focussed directory, it would/could figure more dominantly than the opposite case.

[edited by: TheWhippinpost at 2:03 am (utc) on Feb. 11, 2007]