Deriving Semantic Meaning From Google Results

prostoalex writes "New Scientist talks about Paul Vitanyi and Rudi Cilibrasi of the National Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam and their work to extract meaning of words from Google's index. The pair demonstrates an unsupervised clustering algorithm, which 'distinguish between colours, numbers, different religions and Dutch painters based on the number of hits they return', according to New Scientist."

Well that's good

[Anonymous Coward]

Because God knows I'd never be able to distinguish between dutch painters on my own

Re:Semantic meaning?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Meaning could, in principle, mean 'affective meaning' as in the emotional weight something carries. Maybe Google are also working on emotional search engines and the article poster doesn't want us getting confused with that.

Re:Huh?

[modifried]

Google has determined the meaning of life: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=42&btnG=Googl e+Search [google.com]

I think you might've meant:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=what+is+the+a nswer+to+life%2C+the+universe%2C+and+everything%3F [google.com]

Re:Language is more than words

[Hal XP]

There ought to be a military regulation forbidding the use of anything other than "Yes," "No," or "I don't know, sir" in a combat situation. Right?