What you could do if you were Google and had their databases • Hacker News Board

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#31

Post by sparsevector » Fri, Mar 16, 2012, 5:18 PM UTC

Estragon wrote: post #7

I 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 wa…

This work sounds interesting. Who was the talk by? It sounds like a student of Jon Kleinberg but I quick glance over his publications didn't reveal work on that kind of mechanism design problem.

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#32

Post by orijing » Fri, Mar 16, 2012, 5:18 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #10

Not 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…

The interesting thing is that Google itself has an internal hedge fund (or something close) that trades its cash hoard. I'm not sure if they do it algorithmically or whether they just buy-and-hold various indices, but my suspicion is that (given their engineering background) they probably do some algorithmic trading.

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#33

Post by siculars » Fri, Mar 16, 2012, 5:20 PM UTC

The interesting part is not that Google is looking to augment their search algorithms with human curation, see fb, twitter, bit.ly et al., but rather that their principal metric, links, is losing value as a principal metric.

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#34

Post by cr4zy » Fri, Mar 16, 2012, 5:22 PM UTC

amitamb wrote: post #19

cr4zy wrote: post #12

This post keys into an idea I had recently to combine Klout with anonymized/aggregated web history data (i.e. from a browser extension) to build a URL quality/trending score. Google could obviously do this with Chrome, but I'd like to see a more open method of distributing this data to allow anyone to build on top of it. In the same vein, I'd like to see an open service that websites could ping when they want a page…

> In general, development and ownership of search and social should become more open and distributed just as telephony, electricity, operating systems, and so many more large industries before it. I am working on an effort to do that called VerticalSet. It is a search engine/platform to let developers change search experience the way they want while giving users best search experience. http://www.verticalset.com/

Cool! So an open front end to search. This is why I love HN.

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#35

Post by chmike » Fri, Mar 16, 2012, 5:31 PM UTC

I also believe that this is one of the potential benefit of G+. Though this can also easily be rotten by SEO if they use fake people or mechanical turcs. This may explain the effort to enforce identifying the real person behind an account. Facebook is going for it and google too. And this just to be able to throw bigger shovels of ads to us.

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#36

Post by anonymoushn » Fri, Mar 16, 2012, 5:33 PM UTC

Estragon wrote: post #7

I 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 wa…

Is there a reasonable means to prevent people from spamming their friends to get the discount and then saying over some more trusted channel "Please disregard the spam, I haven't tried this thing and don't know whether it is good yet?"

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#37

Post by abraham » Fri, Mar 16, 2012, 5:35 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #10

Not 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…

Google is already predicting flu trends. I imagine that could be modified for stocks or just about anything else.

http://www.google.org/flutrends/

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#38

Post by dustingetz » Fri, Mar 16, 2012, 5:42 PM UTC

I think this is what jaques is trying to say:

page-rank's design is open to being gamed which has led to an arms race of algorithm tweaks. A social graph has much more powerful signals for figuring out relevant search results.

this isn't a hypothesis. the first iteration is called "search plus your world" and everybody already knows about it.

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#39

Post by laxatives » Fri, Mar 16, 2012, 5:42 PM UTC

anonymoushn wrote: post #36

Estragon wrote: post #7

I 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 wa…

Is there a reasonable means to prevent people from spamming their friends to get the discount and then saying over some more trusted channel "Please disregard the spam, I haven't tried this thing and don't know whether it is good yet?"

You could reward recommendations that result in more recommendations since (hopefully anyway), people won't recommend spam to others. Then you could encourage good products spreading rapidly. But then there's a delay to the reward and users could lose interest. You could also end up dominated by a few power users.

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#40

Post by opendomain » Fri, Mar 16, 2012, 5:43 PM UTC

alecco wrote: post #28

opendomain wrote: post #20

I would build the biggest NoSQL datastore in the world. I would use all public data - anything that could be searched and I would invite other companies to put their data on my cloud. THEN we would find a cure for cancer.

P(tongue-in-cheek) == .5

Um - no. I was entirely serious about curing cancer. I even did a speech at the NY Tech Council on it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud1x6VYEc1Q I believe we can only solve out big problmes by using big data - please do not down vote me