Lycos - powered by Cycorp

[littleman]

..It's at the bottom of all the searches.
Anyone know the deal with this? I found this link [cyc.com] which kind of makes sense.

[han solo]

Thanks for the link...I'll be watching to see if things change. Sounds like they provide something of a skin to the search database, ala lexiquest does for hotbot...wonder if they are competing companies?

The exerpt about Hal was a little freaky, though. I don't think that makes for good press, when your technology partner claims 1) machine intelligence, and 2) references a classic example of how it could go bad, very bad.

I like the idea, though. Imagine the different formats, and thesauri? of the technologies that lycos is using, fast, dmoz, and it's own spider. Now with this other partnership, it has a way to merge the different meters of matching queries, and hopefully will become more accurate.

Great find.

Cheers,
Han Solo

[mivox]

Did you read the whole huge article about HAL and how he commpares to their system?

I dunno... I find the whole idea of functioning artificial intelligence really creepy.

As to whether it will help search results or not... I think it's probably MAJOR overkill on a search engine.

[NFFC]

Thanks LM, it certainly makes interesting reading and I would certainly recommend everyone to do so. Surprising news as well since Fast purchased ELEXIR in October, who offer many of the same processes:

"Linguistic methods for improving the indexing of Web pages and the interpreting of queries will play an increasingly important role for search engines and intranet retrieval systems. As the number of Web pages, as well as intranet documents, grows rapidly, more sophisticated linguistic tools will improve relevancy by adding greater structure and semantic classification to indexes."

October Press Release [fast.no]