Seeing Forests

TechCrunch posts ‘Find Something That Is “X” And Has “Y” With Circos‘ to talk about the Hotel and Restaurant search engine Circos - Search in Color.  At first blush it’s got a lot of promise - finally I can find funky hotels with Internet access in New York.  Filtering using words people actually use as opposed to the garbage you get in a lot of IYP sites (look for hotels in new york on superpages and narrow to the ones providing hunting trips).  Techcrunch goes on about how this is “categorized under the ever expanding umbrella of semantic search engines” which once again shows appalling contempt for the word “semantic”.  All this is doing is string match using a select set of phrases that were probably hand entered.  Don’t get me wrong, this was still useful.  I got some nice hits against “funky” hotels where people had included the word “funky” in their reviews.  On closer inspection there’s no semantics here.  One of the matches was “No funky smells” which isn’t quite the implied meaning of funky.  And doing a search for zen restaurants with bathrooms got me some matches but I’m pretty sure there’s some law that says that restaurants in New York have to have bathrooms.  Still, it’s a step in the right ontological direction, semantically speaking.  

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