17.31, Wednesday 26 Jun 2002

New weblog search engine, Semant-O-Matic, uses a fuzzy search technique called latent semantic indexing. It uses patterns of word proximity to know to look for the phrase "Lord of the Rings" if the user searches for "hobbits" (more information). Having attempted to write a search engine with far too much matrix algebra in myself I know this is really hard, which makes it all the more impressive that Semant-O-Matic works so well.