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Future of Search with Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

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Re: Future of Search with Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

#11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well there are already a few apps such as musicaroid that searches Music and Video by using Yahoo Music(US) API, Google Youtube API, iTunes Store API. Than there are apps like Hound and Midomi where serach happens through voice & humming... and we can look forward to some great stuff when technologies like "Intelligent A.I. search' being developed by Ray Kurzweil at Google becomes a reality.

Hound is just "voice search" for songs: but I'd rather type than speak. I had never heard of Midomi; just went and tested it. It seems to try to do what I'm talking about, but the "matches" seem completely random. It may be that doing this is much harder than it seems; but what I'm talking about is really not about a specific performance, but about melodies (parts of melodies as sequences of intervals). And it should…

I agree, it looks like a hard problem to me too... esp. given the fact that so many of the songs have same scale and chord progressions

Re: Future of Search with Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

#12
post #10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, it works very well for me the last few years. On the other hand, Gracenote — which Path uses — has been terrible for me. Does Shazaam not work well for you for a particular genre?

To be fair, I didn't test it extensively, but the couple of times I tried it (on French songs, mainly) it failed. I also don't fully understand the use case, except maybe if you listen to a lot of radio in a car? At home the music that comes out of my speakers is music I already own; sometimes I listen to radio but even then it's usually faster and more certain to just go to the station's website to check what music…

Ah. I've only tried in on English (language) songs. It's handy if you are out in a cafe or otherwise, public area and want to identify a song.

Singing into the app would be cool. In my ex-company, there were folks working on getting it to work for Karaoke. So you can hum a song and it'll figure out the right track for you to sing with. I don't know if there's a commercialised product like this.

Re: Future of Search with Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

#14

I don't want a "smart personal assistant" who is inherently corrupt, i.e. driven by the desire to sell ads and not to assist me in my best interest. Hopefully, the future of search will be more decentralized and driven by individuals' needs.

I think you fail to explain why one precludes the other. (WRGT ads vs a user's best interest). And I also think that you're overly focused on the monetization aspect of current search technology. Which neither search in general nor Google in particular are tightly coupled to. It's simply the best practical monetization method at the present time.

Re: Future of Search with Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

#15

I don't want a "smart personal assistant" who is inherently corrupt, i.e. driven by the desire to sell ads and not to assist me in my best interest. Hopefully, the future of search will be more decentralized and driven by individuals' needs.

I do not think, showing me ads is a problem for me when I am using a free service. It is finally my choice to click them or not...

Re: Future of Search with Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

#16
post #10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, it works very well for me the last few years. On the other hand, Gracenote — which Path uses — has been terrible for me. Does Shazaam not work well for you for a particular genre?

To be fair, I didn't test it extensively, but the couple of times I tried it (on French songs, mainly) it failed. I also don't fully understand the use case, except maybe if you listen to a lot of radio in a car? At home the music that comes out of my speakers is music I already own; sometimes I listen to radio but even then it's usually faster and more certain to just go to the station's website to check what music…

To shazaam's credit, it identifies popular songs even in non-english languages (Bollywood, Italian, several French songs; anecdotal evidence anyway)

Re: Future of Search with Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

#17
post #2

There are lots of publicly available data sources that aren't searchable and should be. For instance, why can't we search for melodies? I would love to be able to sing a tune and have a system return a list of music pieces where that sequence of intervals is found. It seems pretty possible to do with current technologies - index side: index n-grams of intervals from all music pieces produced (the total corpus of "doc…

It is done! http://www.folktunefinder.com does exactly this. It's not the only service that does this, but it is mine.
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