[The idea behind 'zero tolerance search' posts is to illustrate real life search interactions that show how far we have to go in leveraging the explicit and implicit data in the web and elsewhere.]
Yesterday, I heard part of an interview on NPR. The interview was around a new book on determinism and neuroscience. The only thing I remember about the author was his young age. I wanted to recover the name of the author and the title of his new book so that I could comment on his argument against determinism (which was, essentially, 'I'm afraid of determinism therefore it can't be right').
The query {24 year old neuroscientist} is very clear to a human reader. The goal is to find information about a person who functions in the role of 'neuroscientist' and whose age is 24 years.
The text matching approaches of both Bing and Google essentially fails at this task. The errors they make include:
- Matching on 'year[s] old' without recognizing the requirement that the result has to be about specifically a 24 year old.
- Matching on the bare number '24'.
- Articles about neuroscientists which also mention a '24 year old donor'
- Matching on '18-24 year old samples' of the population.
- A 24 year old who was studying neuroscientist before having a hit song and making a career change.
- '24 year old' in the body of the document versus 'neuroscientist' in the 'about' section for a blogger.
Google edges out Bing by returning a single result in position 5 that does pertain to a 24 year old neuorscientist.
Given all the advances and trumpets employed in search these days, I still, shall we say, interested in results that ignore simple elements of document structure (the bio of the author being mixed with the content of a blog post) and inattention to elemental linguistics in the query (the '24' in '24 year old' really shouldn't match the '24' in 'March 24').
What would be a killer answer to this query would be returning a page about a person who was indeed a 24 year old neuroscientist but where the age and occupation of the individual were not present in the document.