Natural Language Processing and search engines

[tedster]

Today I've been playing with lexxe.com - an Australia-based search engine that is developing technology rooted in what they term "natural language processing" or "computational linguistics". Their Q&A page at [lexxe.com...] makes an interesting read.

Now this is certainly not a "ready for prime time" search engine. But because they are not in the intensely competitive search space, I think it's a facsinating place to get a glimpse of what language processing can presently achieve.

No doubt the majors are also working in this arena. But with so very much on their plate, we don't get a very direct look at their early results the way we can here. The elusive goal of understanding the searcher "intent" may be inching just a bit closer.

[marcs]

Why do all their search results have links to URL's that are redirected via Yahoo?

Just wondering, all results have links like that for the searches I did (non-competitive), as in starting with

[av.rds.yahoo.com...]

Marc

[tedster]

I hadn't noticed that. I assume it's a click tracking agreement using Yahoo's technology (or more exactly AltaVista -- that's the "av" subdomain.)

[Lord Majestic]

They meta search Yahoo and this "language processing" thingy appears to be topic clustering.

[kamakaze]

That is very interesting. The algo seems to be very intelligent for the most part. I think we will see a lot more of this type of technology in the near future.