How do you search for content, not words? Given a string that describes a situation or method, are there algorithms that create fingerprints out of it, compare it with a corpus to then point to pages where a similiar concept is being discussed?
The simple form is word search.
You search for word X and X appears in a text whose excerpt is shown to you.
This is the next step.
You describe X without writing &quot;X&quot; and you get text excerpts as a result where X is also described using different phrases (or even words) with or without an explicit mention of &quot;X&quot;.
How do you search for content, not words?
Hint: I am looking for technical terms for this problem to find research papers.
The general principle about finding text based on meaning similarity is called distributional semantics. The main idea is that words with a similar meaning statistically tend to co-occur with the same context words. This is the basis for many standard tasks like topic modeling, word sense disambiguation/induction, and generally for everything related to semantics.
The problem you're describing is essentially information retrieval: given a query expressed as one or several words, find the &quot;documents&quot; in a corpus which are semantically similar to this query.
[edit] Depending what the data looks like, you might be interested in the more specific task of semantic textual similarity.