[jpsb]

Prescient and ironic? Certainly, because at that very moment two guys named Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working in a Menlo Park “garage” inventing Google, which quickly became one of Microsoft’s worst business nightmares.

NASA invented natural language searching in the early 90s. Google "borrowed" NASAs invention. I will admit the web crawler was a good idea for indexing.

[spintreebob]

NASA invented natural language searching in the early 90s.

News to me. I attended meetings in Chicagoland in 1984-87 where a mix of academics from Northwestern U, U of Chicago and from Fortune 100 firms, and small firms discussed their various efforts at NLP and specifically at search.

There were several different approaches and different products. They all were described as functional; but needing improvement.... sorta like google and apple products still need improvement.

One major concern was not in the NLP code development. It was in the fragmentation of information in many silos. There were several speakers who described Advantis, the first CLOUD, as a way to remove some silos and build bridges between other silos.