‣ 2009-05-15


The new google "Wonder Wheel" (pronounced like "Wonder Woman") is all funky and all but I'm not convinced it's useful.

For example, I happened to be searching for more information on "active learning" the other day. Active learning (as opposed to passive learning) is a framework for training an algorithm where the learner can ask questions of a teacher about particular examples. In passive learning, there is no interaction.

The phrase "active learning" also seems to be a term heavily used to describe a technique for teaching children. I thought the Wonder Wheel might help to choose which of the many related terms is closer to my required definition. Unfortunately, it is still heavily biased towards the mainstream usage.

For my search, I'd require it to take the term and disambiguate it by allowing me to choose disparate clusters for my next step in exploration. As it stands, it's very good for finding related terms in a cluster, but not disambiguating between clusters.

The question is: what's the more common use-case?