Re: New Google search operator finds synonyms

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From: Aron Roberts (aron@socrates.berkeley.edu)
Date: Fri Aug 08 2003 - 14:51:19 PDT

Hi Michael,

I wrote:
>Several days ago, the popular Google search engine added a very
>useful new search operator. When you preface a search term with the
>tilde (~) symbol, Google will search on both your term and its synonyms.

At 14:27 -0700 2003-08-08, Michael Sholinbeck wrote:
>Yes, this looks nice, but:
>
>Start fooling around with it and you will soon wonder just how on earth it
>works. Who made the dictionary of synonyms?

   According to the following report, Google developed its own
thesaurus of synonyms:

<http://www.resourceshelf.com/archives/2003_08_01_resourceshelf_archive.html/#106002798264271915>

>Like most things involving Google these days the company is tight
>lipped to divulge any additional details. Marissa Mayer, a Product
>Manager at Google, tells us that the technology and thesaurus were
>developed by the company. ... The tilde operator ONLY works with the
>English language web database. It does not work with Google News or
>Google Groups.

   Google has been experimenting for some time with synonyms -- and
clustering techniques in general -- as evidenced in part by the
Google Sets <http://labs.google.com/sets> page on its labs.google.com
"technology playground" site.

At 14:27 -0700 2003-08-08, Michael Sholinbeck wrote:
>Why does a search for passover and easter get 141,000 hits, but a search for
>~passover and easter get 139,000 hits? Shouldn't a synonym search get more?
>also, passover and ~easter gets 246,000; ~passover and ~easter gets 247,000.
>...Once a jillion of us start fooling with this, I'm sure more intersting
>things will come up.

   We're definitely likely to find oddities like this in the results
generated by this new search operator. Over time, we'll learn more
about the types of searches and search terms where adding
search-by-synonym can deliver significant benefits.

Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group
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