Last December Google announced it wants to make offline information searchable online. They want to do this by scanning books and other documents from libraries. It made me wonder how you can scan that many pages. Is this a process that is done by hand (turning the pages)?

So I searched for document scanning and found Digital Documents LLC that does document scanning services. One of the things mentioned in this website is character recognition. Not only do you want to scan a page with text, but you want to actually recognize the letters so you can reproduce it. For Google this is very important.

Google wants to make the offline information searchable and therefore has to litterally read and index all the texts in the books. Without character recognition this is not possible. They’re up for a big task, but I am sure they will be successful. They already have most of the leading libraries on board.

How many people do you know who write about things like “The Typology of Stalkers”? Sam Vaknin not only writes about the mind of the stalker, he is the author of “Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited”.

Ever wonder what types of personalities stalkers have?

According to Sam there are four different types of stalker personalities.

Read more here: Typology of Stalkers or if you enjoy his writing do an article search for “Sam Vaknin” here and read some more great articles by this brilliant man.

Search engines are great tools for research. Lets find the love hate score for the 10 actors/singers and 10 actresses/singers. How do we do this? Simply search (in Google) for how many results are found for a the 2 phrases "I love actor name" and "I hate actor name". Here are the results:

The same for the actresses:

So what does this tell us? I think most actors and actresses are more interested in the absolute numbers than in the Love Hate Index it self. In the end, the more they say about you, the more money you make!!!

Humor is one of the best ways to relativate serious matters. David Leonhardt is the happy guy and a regular writer for knowledge-finder.com. He knows how to twist things in a humorous way and actually makes you think about things in a different way. One of his articles titled A 30% chance that statistics never lie, is probably one of his most beautiful articles. I most certainly do think so. The following statistics taken from his article are shocking, but you won’t understand why unless you read the full article:

“If current trends continue, by 2017 every child born will be illiterate.”

Sa-ay. That is good news. And Uncle Gyula was right. In fact, cancer rates in cemeteries remain at historic lows. And statistics never lie.”

If you love statistics, this article is going to make you love them even more.

Even web sites need coaches. Philippa Gamse caught my eye when she submitted an article to knowledge-finder.com titled “How Does Your Website Make Me Feel?” Having built a few sites including this EKF Blog with my partner Peter Faber, we understand how important a welcoming web site is to keep peoples attention. If a business doesn’t have some sort of appeal and flavor folks will just not get it and leave.

I read this morning in a forum that the average time people spend on a web site before deciding to stay or go is only 13 seconds or less! In other words, you have only 13 seconds or less to make your guest feel welcome!

Philippa Gamse is a web site strategy consultant and professional speaker. She helps small and medium sized businesses, entrepreneurs and nonprofit organizations create powerful, differentiated and emotionally intelligent Websites.

Language is probably the only thing that needs it self to be explainable. In other words, you need to use language to explain language. And that is exactly why it is so difficult to have a computer understand language.

But we really would like a computer to be able to understand language. Especially a search engine would benefit if it could understand what we mean with what we type in that little search box.

With current search engines you need to know what you are searching for before you can actually find it. A search query like: “How to clean my kitchen” won’t answer that question, it will merely show you web pages that are about cleaning kitchens. You will most likely find pages that sell cleaning products for in the kitchen.

However, if a human were to select the pages based on the query “How to clean my kitchen”, (s)he would not select cleaning product pages, but informative pages. Why can’t a search engine understand the difference?

The main reason is that a search engine is more a data retrieval and ranking system than an information retrieval and ranking system.

Most search engines ignore “common” words like: how, to, the, a, in, for, etc. Though these words may seem insignificant, they are actually one of the most important words in language. Probably only verbs, and especially all their forms, are more important.

The example “how to clean my kitchen” is an excellent example. A search engine ignores “how” and “to” and basically searches the index based on “clean” and “kitchen”. But “clean kitchen” is not the same as “how to clean my kitchen”. By ignoring “how to” an essential part of the information in the search query is lost.

But how to make a machine know which pages are most related when dealing with a “how to” question? If you look at how the human brain does it, you quickly realize that it cheats. The human brain has a huge database of memories and experience, and all it does is compare the question with the information in the database.

Ask a baby how to clean the kitchen and it won’t even know that you’re talking to it because it hasn’t learned language yet. A 10 year old will know what you want, but lacks experience. A search engine is like a baby that has learned how to walk and recognize words, but has yet to “understand” what a searcher really wants.

The next big step in search engine technology will be the ability to understand language, and most likely it will be a slow learning process. It would not surprise me if this process will take 20 years, about the same time a baby needs to grow up.

While thousands kiss in the Philippines on the day before Valentine’s Day, I realize I am still working on this blog. Actually here in Brazil there is no Valentine’s Day tomorrow. For some reason, which I haven’t figured out yet, Valentine’s Day in Brazil is in June and not in February. My wife likes it though. Since I am Dutch and live in Brazil, she gets 2 Valentine’s Days a year.

This Sunday I hope to finish the complete blog so that we can start telling people about it. I write these posts in my column for testing purposes. I figured that if I have to write test posts, I can just as well make them interesting, even if it is just to my wife and I.

So this will be a short post, but it serves its purpose. Happy Valentine’s Day to Everyone!

Aaron is one of the owners of knowledge-finder.com and this is his personal column.

Honestly, I wasn’t asked to be a columnist in experts.knowledge-finder.com. I just have this column because, together with Aaron, I run this blog. We started knowledge-finder.com a year and 3 months ago, and it has grown to become a well known article website where many writers now submit their articles to. Last year we added a paid directory and this directory is gaining popularity as well. We are really happy with how the site is developing and we decided to add this blog at experts.knowledge-finder.com because we wanted to give many of our valued writers the possibility to get more in touch with their audience.

The many long hours I personally put into this website were worth every second of them. We are receiving 50 to 100 articles per month now and many writers keep coming back to us to submit their latest work. It is most definitely a pleasure to see the popularity of the website growing and the many visitors we get also show that knowledge-finder.com is becoming a great resource. And now with this Blog we hope it will become a bit more interactive.

In my personal column I will be writing just about everything. Those who know me from SEO forums, know I generally have strong opinions that not always follow the general public opinion. My column will be strongly opinionated, but that’s what makes it fun I guess!

I am looking forward to seeing how experts.knowledge-finder.com will develop. We invite you to contact us if you would like to be a columnist as well. We´re looking for specific category writers and general columnists.

Cheers,

Peter

This is the first message in our Experts subdomain. Recognized (by us) writers are allowed to post their messages and articles for free.