Entity resolution

Entity resolution is the process by which a system decides which known entity a given mention refers to, rather than treating the name as just a string of text.

Entity resolution is long-established vocabulary in information retrieval and data engineering, where it also covers record linkage and deduplication.

In search it describes what Google does every time your business name appears anywhere on the web.

Entity resolution decides who a mention is about. Disambiguation is the harder case of resolution where several candidates share a name.

Keyword matching compares strings. Resolution assigns a mention to an identity, which is why two businesses with identical names can get completely different treatment.

The book's point is that Google is not really matching your name at all: when it resolves a mention it is deciding which machine ID the mention belongs to, and every ranking consideration, panel display and confidence judgement happens at the level of that ID rather than the words. That is why the same name can produce a rich panel for one business and nothing for another.

Read about the book's argument.