this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Searching with synonym matching is almost.decades old at this point. I worked on it as an undergrad in the early 2000s.and it wasn't new then, just complicated. Google's version improved over other search algorithms for a long time.and then trashed it by letting AI take over.
Google's algorithm has pretty much always used AI techniques.
It doesn't have to be a synonym. That's just an example.
Typing diabetes and getting medical services as a result wouldn't be possible with that technique unless you had a database of every disease to search against for all queries.
The point is AI means you don't have to have a giant lookup of linked items as it's trained into it already.
Yes, synonym searching doesn't strictly mean the thesaurus. There are a lot of different ways to connect related terms and some variation in how they are handled from one system to the next. Letting machine learning into the mix is a very new step in a process that Library and Information Sci has been working on for decades.