What you could do if you were Google and had their databases
jacquesmattheij.com
What you could do if you were Google and had their databases
1–10 of 84 posts
Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases
#2Definitely makes some sense. I don't know that this is actually a bad thing though. I personally care more about quality (read: relevant) search results than the details of how they are created. If Google is able to use a social network like Google+ to legitimately improve their search offering so that I have an easier time finding something relevant and interesting using their search engine when I need it, then I'm ok with that.
Of course, this is predicated on the assumption that google is able to effectively use Google + to tweak their main algorithms. I don't want to be barraged with direct G+ links in my search results - I want the relevant websites themselves. Furthermore, there should be a way to opt-out if people are uncomfortable with the lack of privacy, even if the default is their current privacy policy.
Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases
#3The article mentions Google's developers. I don't think Google's developers are worth much now to Google, because they have no hunger. A friend at Google says most of the engineers are just waiting to vest. Look at the poor quality of the speech recognition coming out of Google Voice for an example of the result of engineers simply not caring. To me Google is the new Yahoo!
Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases
#4Interesting, but I don't think Google wanted to go social to decrease the damages of link spamming.
People already do social network spamming. There are plenty of sites where you can pay for a certain number of +1's or likes.
Using a combination of inputs, social interaction, page links, keywords, they can achieve a better overall ranking algorithm, which is probably one reason they wanted to go social.
However I think the main reason Google wanted to go social was to be able categorise their users better. The more they know about their users, the better they can serve ads.
Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases
#5The article mentions Google's developers. I don't think Google's developers are worth much now to Google, because they have no hunger. A friend at Google says most of the engineers are just waiting to vest. Look at the poor quality of the speech recognition coming out of Google Voice for an example of the result of engineers simply not caring. To me Google is the new Yahoo!
Speech recognition on new voices transmitted over the phone is a lot harder then something like speech recognition in android or siri. Is there anything that beats google voice at transcribing voicemail? As far as I know there isn't.
Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases
#6The article mentions Google's developers. I don't think Google's developers are worth much now to Google, because they have no hunger. A friend at Google says most of the engineers are just waiting to vest. Look at the poor quality of the speech recognition coming out of Google Voice for an example of the result of engineers simply not caring. To me Google is the new Yahoo!
Having interned there last summer, my observation is that you're completely wrong. Who knows, maybe they were all just hiding it for three months.
Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases
#7I recently attended a talk at Cornell by a guy who is due to start working at Google soon. He had not started working there, but presumably he was hired on the basis of the work he described, and he was explicitly interested in applying his framework to the Google social network.
He was working on a scheme to get people to recommend things to their friends in return for discounts on those things. His central focus was on devising a payout scheme in which people's economically optimal strategy is honestly reporting the cost of making the recommendation, and then choosing the optimum set of people with whom to make this deal for a given budget. Optimum in the sense of influencing the most people with the recommendations.
Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases
#8The article mentions Google's developers. I don't think Google's developers are worth much now to Google, because they have no hunger. A friend at Google says most of the engineers are just waiting to vest. Look at the poor quality of the speech recognition coming out of Google Voice for an example of the result of engineers simply not caring. To me Google is the new Yahoo!
Having interned there last summer, my observation is that you're completely wrong. Who knows, maybe they were all just hiding it for three months.
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Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases
#9[deleted]
Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases
#10Not sure it would be legal, but I would put a significant amount of devs onto predicting stocks. A blog goes more silent or people start Googling for "what is fraud, exactly?" from IPs known to contain lots of IBM workers (that would be more on the illegal end for sure).
Obviously a lawyer would need to review every input, but they have access to machine learning and data so much so that they could rock the exchanges.