It's an interesting idea. The main obstacle that I see is trying to infer meaning from posts. If someone happens to mention an array in passing, does that get a hit? Should 'rep' be taken into account? (I think not. I've seen great posts with low reps and vice versa).

In my view, there are two ways to infer meaning from posts. Have the developers provide the meaning or the Seekers provide the meaning. For the developers to provide the meaning, someone has to take a look at each post and develop a list of keywords for it. Currently, your post is 88786. That's a lot of posts to go through.

Actually, I don't think it's that daunting of a task, so long as a group of people were splitting up posts to work on (say, getting a list of root nodes and dividing evenly). If standards were laid down, most threads could be skipped. There wouldn't even need to be keywords for many posts (i.e. posts like this one).

If the keyword idea has merit (and I suspect that it's the only way to keep down the signal to noise ratio), then there are a few issues:

• We'd need the cooperation of The Everything Development Company.
• Who volunteers to go through posts? Who trusts the volunteers?
• Developing standards: no one should 'type in' a keyword (how many ways do you think 'pseudo-hash' would be spelled?). They should be chosen from drop downs. Uh oh! That limits things. Perhaps a text field with an 'other' category?

That would be a pain. The other (better) way is for the seekers to tell us what the meaning it. The technique would be to develop an algorithm that would try to infer what the questioner asked, but have a 'rate it' poll in each post (so long as the seeker went through the AI routine). Then, the seeker would rate each question on a scale of 1 - 10 as to how well the post addressed the seeker's question. Over time, if seekers actually used the poll, I think that would produce excellent results. Further, it would be much easier to implement.

Cheers,
Ovid

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