‘We discovered a nifty thing very early on,’ Singhal says. ‘People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.’
From Wired’s How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web
The more that computers “think” about information in the ways and manners that humans do, the more powerful a tool they can be.
