Blogging about technology for 23 Things…

I recently read somewhere or other about Wikia search which… is a work in process obviously and thankfully.

But it reminded me of how I’d ranted to a colleague the other day that it’s only the complete and utter lack of any programming skills whatsoever (well, Basic and html and a tiny bit of javascript) that stops me creating my own search engine which would search on synonyms automatically: so someone could type in “television” and the search engine would search for “television OR TV OR telly”. Then it’d rank the results so that results with more of the synonyms were rated higher. And it’d also know when one word can have two meanings and figure out which meaning was intended according to what other keywords were used, or – if no other keywords are available to disambiguate – can ask the user which meaning was intended.

Okay, it has potential for all sorts of havoc and it’d probably be a bit tricky, but (as a non-programmer) I don’t think it’d be *too* tricky; is there really no-one working on something like this?