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Semantic search
A brief post on semantics, search, and semantic search
⚠️ READ THE ORIGINAL POST IN MY BLOG ⚠️
Semantics is a branch of linguistics studying the meanings of words, their symbolic use, also including their multiple meanings.
“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.” Groucho Marx
This sentence is semantically ambiguous: it’s not clear if the author shoots an elephant while in his pajamas, or if he shot the elephant, which happened to be in his pajamas. Clearly, in this example only one of the two makes sense, but both cases are gramatically correct.
“John and Mary are married.” (To each other? or separately?)
“John kissed his wife, and so did Sam”. (Sam kissed John’s wife or his own?)
More information on linguistic ambiguity.
Lexical search engines
At first, search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc.) were lexical: the search engine looked for literal matches of the query words, without understanding of the query’s meaning and only returning links that contained the exact query.