Re: Have you all gone crazy? Was: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[David Kastrup]

Tom <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> Google substitutes better quality with graceful failure based on
>> heuristics.  That works for some things better than others.  It
>> certainly will not help much replacing a "concept index" since the whole
>> point of a concept index is _not_ to be based on exact keywords.
>> 
>
> Which is also true for Google, beacuse it automatically finds
> alternate keywords (e.g. close file -> kill buffer) and it does it
> better than any manually compiled index, because it takes into 
> account lots more variations.

It puts up a lot more false positives, and sifting through them can make
this quite useless.  Particularly if we are talking about words that
have also common meanings.  Try Googling for the relation between "cat"
and "less".

-- 
David Kastrup