Pandia Post No. 22 Part 2

Kozoru wants to give relevant answers to your questions

New search engine for natural language questions planned for next summer.

By Lars Iselid

(August 2004) Gary Price writes in his blog Resourceshelf about a new search service called Kozoru .

John Flowers, Kozoru’s founder, feels that the search engines of today work by the hypothesis “more is better”. Kozoru, on the other hand, will have the motto “correct is better”. They want to answer natural language questions, like Ask Jeeves did once. Brainboost is the only one to do this successfully today.

John Flowers is critical to the search engines on the arena today. He points out that computers are great at mathematics, but when it comes to natural language, which does not always follow logical rules, they are not so great. He finds it, for instance, insufficient to sort scores of results by importance.

Many search services have tried to solve this problem by using different ways to visualize the hits. But what do these visualizations matter if there are just too many hits, and not all of them that relevant?

These are by no means new questions. Search engines like Excite and Infoseek both wanted to go further than regular matching of search terms between query and page content and tried to understand the semantics behind the queries.

So far the search engines have found a short cut by utilizing link analyses techniques. But this has proved to be inadequate, especially with regard to solving the problem of search engine spamming.

Flowers has translated 980 000 English words into ones and zeroes and is planning to develop a knowledge database by using dictionaries and even encyclopedias.

Working with dictionaries is not new to computer linguists. Hapax is a Swedish enterprise where linguist Eva Ejerhed works to find the key to better search techniques in language itself.

Flowers does not have the background of the typical computer nerd, but has exams in philosophy and English. For his newly founded firm, located just outside of Kansas City, he has succeeded in getting one of the Ask Jeeves founders, David Wharten, to join him.

The Johnson County Sun describes his recent travels in southeast Asia and how Flowers returned with the “solution”. This should be taken with a pinch of salt, especially considering that there is no product yet and there won’t be in another 9-12 months. The fact that David Wharten has joined the project makes it interesting, though, and also that Flowers has grasped that you need to understand language in order to provide correct answers.

Go to page 3: Recent search engine news and articles