Advertisement ::

Enlarge Cartoon

Peter Gaechter lives in France, near Geneva

By Peter Gaechter

The other day I received an email with an attachment.  The subject line said it was the poster of the Madrid Book Fair and it shows a woman being embraced by a wall of words. The poster comes with a poem ascribed to Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner.

Don’t ask me to take something at face value, especially when it comes attached to a mail. I decided to test the new, improved Google search engine that the company announced on 12 May at their searchology symposium to determine what was what about the poster and the poem. I was looking for a translation and the origins of the poster.

Try switching to Spanish and see what happens

On the Google page, I switched my preferences to Spanish, typed in “Pablo Neruda afiche”, the Spanish for poster, and hit return. In the blue results bar at the top left, you now have a “Show options” panel. If you click on that, the page reorganizes and you get further options: you can have results organized by time (past 24 hours, past week, past year), which is useful if you’re looking for news stories, by relevance or by date. Among the options for standard results, is one, “images from page”.

Since I was looking for an image, I tried this and restricted the time frame to the past week, hoping that my attachment would be returned. I got 61 results that linked Neruda with poster in some way, and the actual images of posters were returned as well. None of them were the poster I was looking for, however.

So I tried another of the new options, one Google is quite pleased about. It’s the aptly named wonder wheel. Once you click on that, the results are pushed to the right side of the screen and in the centre is a blue circle with the search criterion in the middle of it.

To put it through its paces, I typed in Swat, as in the conflict region in Pakistan. The blue circle is surrounded by related terms, each connected by a line. This is Google’s attempt at relational search management, I guess you’d call it. The search engine doesn’t know what I want with “Swat”, and until I type in “Swat, Pakistan” it assumes I’m interested in the game. Once it sees that my interest is in Pakistan, the related options it offers me are military operations, curfew and Rehman Malik (the interior minister).

Google is trying to read its customers “intent”

Google says that it is attempting to understand its customers better, and to understand their intent. “The real goal is that we have many users and we have to solve their problems. What is user intent, what do they need and get it to them,” says Udi Manber, vice president of engineering at Google.

The results on the right side of the page reflect my choice of options on the wonder wheel. The great thing for someone who easily gets sidetracked by following links willy-nilly is that the wonder wheel keeps track of your original blue circle so that you can hop right back to it. Neat feature.

Not Neruda!

Back to my search. I repeated the exercise to find a translation of the poem on the poster. It turns out that the poem is not by Neruda. It’s by a young man who lives in the Basque country in Spain.  But he’s probably not too distressed to have a poem of his confused with one by Neruda. It hasn’t been translated yet.

It also turns out that the poster isn’t from the Madrid Book Fair, either. I sent them an email and asked.

Background: ZDNet Blog

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.