Intelligent remarks about 'intelligent' search
Tim Bray provides some been-there-done-that insights on the difficulties of natural language databases. Pull quote:
....intelligence in search requires deep processing of human languages, which (many believe) is the single most important defining characteristic of human intelligence.
Actually, it's even worse. A retrieval engine is trying to match up externalized representations of the notions in the head of the searcher, and of the various authors of target documents. It's forced immediately into the problem of language ambiguity, and the stubborn refusal of real people to operate their brains according to engineered taxonomies or ontologies.
Via Don Park