10 Okt 2008
Google Phrase Based Indexing Patent Granted
Before becoming a co-founder of the new search engine Cuil, Anna Lynn Patterson worked at Google upon a way of looking at how often different phrases appeared together on pages on the Web, described in a series of patent applications which share a common description, with different claims sections that itemize different parts of that description.
I summarized the description from one of the patent filings in my post from December 29, 2006, in Phrase Based Information Retrieval and Spam Detection
One of the patent applications from that series, Automatic taxonomy generation in search results using phrases, which I hadn’t originally come across back in 2006, was granted today, and covers the idea of taking documents that share related phrases, and clustering them with the related phrases to provide search results that might cover a range of categories related to search queries.
Clustering
What do I mean by clustering?
I watched a great example of clustering this weekend during a television show on Global Warming.
The show used a golfing analogy to describe the differences between attempting to predict weather patterns for a few days in the future, and for a much longer period of time.
Using different theories to try to forecast the weather for three for four days in the future is a little like trying to putt a golfball into the hole from about ten feet away. Imagine each variation of a theory to predict the weather as a swing, and a golfball approaching the hole as a prediction.
Because the distance isn’t too far, most of the golfballs hit will come very close to the hole, clustering around it. If you have 50 different theories, you may end up with 50 golfballs closely together around the hole.
Predicting the weather a few years in the future based upon different theories may be more like trying to trying to hit a golfball into a hole from 250 feet away. Hit a few thousand golfballs towards the hole, and they will be spread further apart. You may see a pattern emerge, with some balls clustered together, and some clusters closer and futher to one another.
Similar golf swings (or similar theories) may result in some golf balls being clustered closer together. When you have clusters of golfballs farther apart, they may be the result of golfball swings (or theories) that are very different. The clusters could be said to cover different categories of theories related to predicting the weather.
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