> In search engines, it's more valuable for your users to not have to learn how your algorithm works in order to craft a search query that will satisfy their needs.
Well, yes. But in this case it's not an algorithm. You just ask it for documents containing your search terms. It's about as straightforward as it gets. It's not computer programming, it's not even doing long divisions or whatever.
You can't seriously assume that method of searching is going to completely stump anyone.
> It's valuable to be able to use natural language to search.
Maybe you're forgetting here that not the entire world speaks English. Unless your natural language search engine is able to understand nearly every language in the world, you're still forcing the users to formulate a query in English.
And I'm willing to argue that for, say, your average middle-aged German, formulating a query in English is going to pose a much bigger problem than doing a conjunctive term search, as the latter carries transparently to most languages in the world. (not all of them--I should check which ones btw--but even in those cases it's not nearly as difficult to find a fix for that than it would be to somehow port your brilliant semantic context analysis engine to be able to speak yet another completely different language).
Give it a couple of decades, maybe we'll have usable NLP then, but before that time, I am convinced that even for the layman, searching for documents to contain certain terms is a lot more straightforward, likely to yield desired results and in quite a few ways actually easier to use than what has to pass for NLP currently.
Well, yes. But in this case it's not an algorithm. You just ask it for documents containing your search terms. It's about as straightforward as it gets. It's not computer programming, it's not even doing long divisions or whatever.
You can't seriously assume that method of searching is going to completely stump anyone.
> It's valuable to be able to use natural language to search.
Maybe you're forgetting here that not the entire world speaks English. Unless your natural language search engine is able to understand nearly every language in the world, you're still forcing the users to formulate a query in English.
And I'm willing to argue that for, say, your average middle-aged German, formulating a query in English is going to pose a much bigger problem than doing a conjunctive term search, as the latter carries transparently to most languages in the world. (not all of them--I should check which ones btw--but even in those cases it's not nearly as difficult to find a fix for that than it would be to somehow port your brilliant semantic context analysis engine to be able to speak yet another completely different language).
Give it a couple of decades, maybe we'll have usable NLP then, but before that time, I am convinced that even for the layman, searching for documents to contain certain terms is a lot more straightforward, likely to yield desired results and in quite a few ways actually easier to use than what has to pass for NLP currently.