Google distance between words (0901.4180v2)

Abstract: Cilibrasi and Vitanyi have demonstrated that it is possible to extract the meaning of words from the world-wide web. To achieve this, they rely on the number of webpages that are found through a Google search containing a given word and they associate the page count to the probability that the word appears on a webpage. Thus, conditional probabilities allow them to correlate one word with another word's meaning. Furthermore, they have developed a similarity distance function that gauges how closely related a pair of words is. We present a specific counterexample to the triangle inequality for this similarity distance function.