Re: LLMs, I was trying to better understand how pre-LLM search worked, hence the interest in the topic.
Any chance you have any open source links that discuss how you practically operate a system based on the concept you describe (manual query rewrite w/i a session as your data set)? Perhaps it's obvious to an NLP person how to reduce that "idea" to practice, but it is not to me!
You're definitely right about the idea though - a former Search engineer obliquely mentioned that this sort of session based manual query rewriting was very core to how the synonym system worked.
Very cool that you worked on it! I've found most, I think, of the patents. They are.... as has been hinted at in this thread, very difficult to parse through and (imo) don't actually reveal much, though I may just lack the expertise! That's why I was hoping to get some NLP folks to speculate!
Your point on dates is something I did want to call out - I wouldn't be asking this if it wasn't ancient history. I have no interest in doing anything sinister. Just trying to explore a fun part of Internet history. Any shot I could shoot you an email to chat?
One of the most important components of Pre-2010 Google's search system was its synonym discovery mechanism. Simply put, queries would be "expanded" with synonyms. Google automatically generated synonym choices that took into account the context of surrounding words, with the understanding that synonyms are highly context dependent. Steven Baker, John Lamping, and a couple of others were key engineers of the system.
Does anyone with a NLP background care to take some guesses on how the synonym extraction methodology worked? My only piece of information is that it likely used the query log itself to do so.