Google search options
Google is really pushing the pedal this fall. They have a lot of new features and products lined up and recently a few new nice features showed up on google.com. Their market leading search engine has gotten a list of new filter options on a search. After you search you now get a Show Options button straight below the search field. When you click upon that button, you may now filter your search result, showing only the latest entries and so on.
One of the features available is what Google calls a Wonder Wheel. This a wheel that shows semantically interesting searches near the one you just performed. This is a very interesting feature, but sometimes this can give you unexpected results. As you can see in the search results below, Odd is a Scandinavian name. He is not necessarily odd, strange or weird. We have just experienced a nice example of semantics that have gone a bit awry. I guess Google might identify situations like this soon, but until then we may laugh a bit at this little screen dump.
What is really interesting though is how this might be handled. Consider a world where the source data Google is analyzing is telling Google that this is a name, and thus cannot be a synonym to other words. Where there is no doubt whether this is the first name or last name. You might have heard the name before. It’s called a semantic web.
I wonder what the wheel is trying to tell me.