Tuesday 5 February 2008

Natural language web searches, ProLog and my constant lateness

During the last three months I studied logical programming, focusing on ProLog, and thought that it could be interesting to use its powerful deductive capabilities to improve web searches, making them more logical and natural.

I googled a bit and discovered that, as always, there's someone who's developing in that direction: Powerlabs is a San Francisco company, working on a search engine based on natural language processing; they're trying to push web searches further the "simple" matching of keywords.

Actually, I don't have any idea of the languages and algorythms they're using (I just read they're seeking RoR programmers for the front-end... GOOD!), but the idea is quite similar. Are they gonna be next Google?

5 comments:

Ale said...

I guess google's already moving toward that direction. They're bright, I bet they're developing system to improve searches by natural language selection.

Anyway, google, similarly to wikipedia, aims to organize the internet knowledge.
I think that even if they aren't developing such technologies, they will implement them (or buy them) to improve the user experience.

Ale said...

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070209-8808.html

KC said...

You should sign up for Powerlabs and see a sneak peek of our natural language technology.

-Katie Conry
Powerset Anaylst

Unknown said...

I'm playing with powermouse and.. I like it very much! it's *exactly* what I had in mind.

It works well! Maybe the knowledge base is a little short, but it's stunning anyway!


@Akiross: I suppose you're right. I think powerset is going to be a killer application and Google will.. "eat" it.

nova77 said...

Anche noi cerchiamo qualcuno, perĂ² devi essere bravo! ;-)