Some ideas on searching and semantics

By using keywords as the way to do searching, the search engine can't exactly know what the user wants, what the search engine knows for sure is that what the user expects is something that contains the keywords literally. It can do some work to guess what will be the most possible answer, but there is no way to ensure that, and it's left for the user to change its keywords.

So in both perspective, from user and search engine, we will do some guess work, we guess these keywords will give us something we want and search engine guess its algorithm can present the user the most possible answer.

In this way, the keyword becomes an ambiguous id of the content, if we have never read its content and it's not ranked very high by search engine, we probably will not find it.

Can we do search in another way? For example, we can describe something, and let the search engine find them for us. We can give the user a more strict query language other than natural language to help the search engine understands the meaning. After that there is still another obstacle which hiders us: we don't understand the content on the web since most of them are described in natural language. Can we expect the information maker to give us another version of content? Not that easy, because we currently don’t have a way to describe everything that could be understood by humans.

The maybe the left critical work relies on natural language processing.

Here is a quote from Microsoft Page:

"The challenges we face stem from the highly ambiguous nature of natural language. As an English speaker you effortlessly understand a sentence like "Flying planes can be dangerous". Yet this sentence presents difficulties to a software program that lacks both your knowledge of the world and your experience with linguistic structures. Is the more plausible interpretation that the pilot is at risk, or that the danger is to people on the ground? Should "can" be analyzed as a verb or as a noun? Which of the many possible meanings of "plane" is relevant? Depending on context, "plane" could refer to, among other things, an airplane, a geometric object, or a woodworking tool. How much and what sort of context needs to be brought to bear on these questions in order to adequately disambiguate the sentence?"