Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
This new item has hit Slashdot: Deriving Semantic Meaning from Google Results.
Seems a couple of scientists have devised a method where they take page results for pairing of words and from these determine which pairing is more semantically meaningful. They call this the Normalized Google Distance or NGD for short.
Their hope is that this work could be used to assist computers in understanding human language. Or lordy, aren’t weblogs going to mess up the works. Can you imagine the effect?
Machine: I am IGOR, automated voting system. How may I help you?
Human: I am here to vote for President.
Machine: Please input your choice.
Human: I am voting for President Bush
Machine: Just to verify, are you voting for Bush who is the scum bag dirt wad ignorant asshole?
Saaaay. Maybe this isn’t such a bad idea.