Google distance between words

Rudi Cilibrasi and Paul 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 distance function that gauges how closely related a pair of words is. We intend to review Cilibrasi and Vitanyi’s work. In particular, we aim to improve their distance function through elimination of random data.