Richard: What do you think about semantic technologies (like for example Hakia)? How important is natural language understanding for search and is Google doing anything in this direction?
Matt:
We do pay a lot of attention to a lot of different technologies, so I
would define Google's approach as very pragmatic. And we keep an eye on
the entire space and we try to say, ‘ok what are the areas that are
most promising for users?’ Historically it's always interesting to view
the progress of semantic technologies. For example if you do a search
like: 'how many states are in America?'. Some search engines that claim
to be semantic won't do a good job in delivering the right results,
whereas Google can do a very good job - even if you think, ‘ok how can
they handle natural language, or how can they handle the semantics of
that search.’ And I think what Google benefits from is the sheer size
of the Web and the sheer amount of data, and it really does help us
understand the meanings of words and synonyms. So we do have a
pragmatic approach and we don't necessarily place all our bets on one
particular way of doing things. We are exploring a lot of different
things all at once.
粗斜体那部分，大概是这么说的，“举例来讲，如果你搜索‘美国有多少个州’，有些号称可以处理语义的搜索引擎返回的结果并不好，然而Google却可以做得很棒，即便你会想，‘他们是如何处理自然语言的，或者他们是如果处理搜索语义的呢？’
结果，有人真的做了这个实验，把"how many states are in America"作为搜索关键字，下面是Google和Windows Live Search得到的结果：
http://www.cnblogs.com/Levins提供
http://www.cnblogs.com/Levins提供