Search software can tell its Michael Jacksons apart

TECHNOLOGY BOFFS at the University of Tokyo in, surprise, Japan, have developed a nifty piece of software which will be able to pick apart results from a search engine query and identifying unique names and identities from the results, reports New Scientist.

An example cited by the magazine says that the tool is able to tell the difference between infamous private theme park owner Michael Jackson and a beer guru with the same name, both of who appear on the first page of results for "Michael Jackson" on Google.

When a user searches for a name on Google, the program will look at the first 100 results returned, and examines common words in the search summary to see if the results will relate to different people of the same name. The program will also give users a guesstimate on how many different identities for the same name have been returned.

Testing revealed that the app is between 70% and 95% accurate at distinguishing between different names, says New Scientist. Co-developer of the program, Danushka Bollegala, reckons that the tool will really help webwatchers refine their searches: "The keywords extracted by the algorithm can be used to suggest better queries to the user," he said. µ