How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google • Hacker News Board

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#11

Post by rsync » Sat, May 04, 2013, 3:56 PM UTC

All grand plans indeed ... but a higher priority should be making search even work at all.

Google search returns approximate results, related results, results with your words split (or joined) and other nonsense to drive ad views.

Even using the so-called "power tools" like allinsite: and the (barely functional) quotation marks, you still get very shoddy results.

Anyone who ever searches for very specific groups of terms knows exactly what I am talking about: enter search terms, click on result, search in page for term, doesn't exist.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#12

Post by nmridul » Sat, May 04, 2013, 4:04 PM UTC

youngerdryas wrote: post #4

>Kurzweil eventually wants to help create a “cybernetic friend” that knows what you want before you do I am not sure I want that. At least not as much as Google does. Kurzweil is going to help me click on more ads. Shreds any sense of him being a visionary.

Read somewhere - "Its sad to see that all the best brains are working now just to make you and me click that Ad".

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#13

Post by wslh » Sat, May 04, 2013, 4:17 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #11

All grand plans indeed ... but a higher priority should be making search even work at all. Google search returns approximate results, related results, results with your words split (or joined) and other nonsense to drive ad views. Even using the so-called "power tools" like allinsite: and the (barely functional) quotation marks, you still get very shoddy results. Anyone who ever searches for very specific groups of t…

Use the verbatim mode in the search results. In this way Google returns results with all your terms.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#14

Post by Sven7 » Sat, May 04, 2013, 4:19 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #11

All grand plans indeed ... but a higher priority should be making search even work at all. Google search returns approximate results, related results, results with your words split (or joined) and other nonsense to drive ad views. Even using the so-called "power tools" like allinsite: and the (barely functional) quotation marks, you still get very shoddy results. Anyone who ever searches for very specific groups of t…

Google needs to create a search market place around that index of theirs. They need to open it up.

Search is too big a problem for just a couple people at Mountain View to be working on. And at this stage with the amount of data being generated, no one really has the infrastructure to compete.

Hope they do it before the regulators make them. If Apple has succeeded at building a market place around their closed platform Google can too.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#15

Post by dude_abides » Sat, May 04, 2013, 4:24 PM UTC

Douglas Hofstadter once said of Ray Kurzweil and his grand ideas: "It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid."

I think Google (and Larry Page) is betting that they will be able to separate out this mixture.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#16

Post by Lost_BiomedE » Sat, May 04, 2013, 4:25 PM UTC

wslh wrote: post #13

rsync wrote: post #11

All grand plans indeed ... but a higher priority should be making search even work at all. Google search returns approximate results, related results, results with your words split (or joined) and other nonsense to drive ad views. Even using the so-called "power tools" like allinsite: and the (barely functional) quotation marks, you still get very shoddy results. Anyone who ever searches for very specific groups of t…

Use the verbatim mode in the search results. In this way Google returns results with all your terms.

Is there a way to make this the default, so I don't have to click, search tools -> all results -> verbatim?

Edit: Thanks, comex. Made google.com become: http://www.google.com/webhp?tbs=li:1

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#17

Post by ot » Sat, May 04, 2013, 4:31 PM UTC

dude_abides wrote: post #15

Douglas Hofstadter once said of Ray Kurzweil and his grand ideas: "It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid." I think Google (and Larry Page) is betting that they will be able to separate out this mixture.

The irony is that you could say the exact same thing about Douglas Hofstadter himself.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#18

Post by SkyMarshal » Sat, May 04, 2013, 4:32 PM UTC

nmridul wrote: post #12

youngerdryas wrote: post #4

>Kurzweil eventually wants to help create a “cybernetic friend” that knows what you want before you do I am not sure I want that. At least not as much as Google does. Kurzweil is going to help me click on more ads. Shreds any sense of him being a visionary.

Read somewhere - "Its sad to see that all the best brains are working now just to make you and me click that Ad".

Jeff Hammerbacher.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#19

Post by threeseed » Sat, May 04, 2013, 4:33 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #11

All grand plans indeed ... but a higher priority should be making search even work at all. Google search returns approximate results, related results, results with your words split (or joined) and other nonsense to drive ad views. Even using the so-called "power tools" like allinsite: and the (barely functional) quotation marks, you still get very shoddy results. Anyone who ever searches for very specific groups of t…

It is just me or is it a recent change ?

I find Google Search to be incredibly frustrating to use because it chooses to ignore search terms even when pages exist with those terms. Google better be really careful because crippling the experience in order to sell more advertising reminds me why I switched away from Altavista.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#20

Post by comex » Sat, May 04, 2013, 4:34 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #11

All grand plans indeed ... but a higher priority should be making search even work at all. Google search returns approximate results, related results, results with your words split (or joined) and other nonsense to drive ad views. Even using the so-called "power tools" like allinsite: and the (barely functional) quotation marks, you still get very shoddy results. Anyone who ever searches for very specific groups of t…

As annoying as the approximation can be, I'd like a citation for "to drive ad views". It seems much more likely that it was added for the obvious reason - to improve search results, on average, for most people, because relevant results don't always contain the exact search term you put in. In my case, as many times as it's burned me, there have also been a few where I remember it presenting exactly the results I wanted, and it's probably done so many more times without my noticing. YMMV, and it would certainly be nice if Google were better able to distinguish queries that should not be rewritten from ones that probably should, but that's no reason to assign nefarious motives.

As has been mentioned, you should probably set your default search to verbatim mode.