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

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#31

Post by anonymfus » Sat, May 04, 2013, 4:59 PM UTC

modarts wrote: post #8

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.

Sounds like a Minority Report version of Clippy.

It's inverse.

Clippy told people how to do their work more efficiently, and because people don't like to remember new ways of doing work if their old habits sufficient, people hate him. Clippy was like computerized supervisor, slave driver, who looked over their shoulders and told them "You selected one menu item 5 times, better use keyboard shortcut to mine more uranium for your Master."

Google wants to tell people what to do. He is like missionary, every layman would respect him for making life easer. People would love Google for this.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#32

Post by coldtea » Sat, May 04, 2013, 5:03 PM UTC

ot wrote: post #17

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.

Really? I don't think so.

For one, Kurzweill DOES have "grand" ideas. Extravagant visions of a future with technological immortality, singularity, etc. Hofstadter does not. He merely examines some things, like cognition, and proposes some theories about their workings. Like, you know, every scientist.

Kurzweill comes out as grandioze, obsessive and deluded, Hofstadter like a normal writer, no more or less strange than, say, Marvin Minsky.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#33

Post by comex » Sat, May 04, 2013, 5:03 PM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #29

comex wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 want…

Whatever the reason. It has changed recently and is annoying. Search for "vertx play framework" and the last two search results don't have the term vertx despite pages and pages of results with the term. I don't understand how dropping search terms can make the results more relevant. Also you can't set the default search to verbatim. You can only hack the query parameters in specific browsers.

> Whatever the reason. It has changed recently and is annoying.

Fair enough. Like I said, it can certainly be improved, and perhaps recent changes have gone too far.

> Also you can't set the default search to verbatim. You can only hack the query parameters in specific browsers.

Don't the kind of people that frequent this site near universally use their browsers to search, rather than wasting keypresses navigating to google.com?

Ridiculously, Safari, which I use, requires an extension to use an arbitrary search engine, but I can't think of another browser that doesn't support it.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#34

Post by coldtea » Sat, May 04, 2013, 5:12 PM UTC

sixQuarks wrote: post #26

Is it just me, or does Ray Kurzweil seem to be getting younger? I remember seeing a speech of his a few years ago, he had a nervous tick where he was blinking his eyes constantly. He also looked a lot older. Now, he doesn't have that tick, seems to have more hair, etc. I know he takes like 100 pills every day

People can look older and younger at different times, depending on weight gain or loss, stress or depression, choice of clothing, plastic surgery (duh!), more or less workout, etc.

Him getting 100 pills every day: I don't think is very relevant. Mostly delusional. If that worked, pharmaceutical companies would have made it into one mega-pill, and sold it for a fortune to rich people years ago.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#35

Post by dpatrick86 » Sat, May 04, 2013, 5:19 PM UTC

jaxytee wrote: post #9

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.

I'm 100% sure I don't want this. Exploration and discovery as a whole is one of the most rewarding experiences we have as humans. I don't want that outsourced to some machine/ algorithm. I addition to that, we deal with so much cognitive dissonance within our brains on a day to day, minute to minute, millisecond to millisecond basis, I'm not convinced Google (even with their massive cache of data on us) could even pr…

I'm not in love with the personally tailored search experience as it stands.

I'm totally OK with searching "#{my_city} taxi" instead of "taxi" if it means when I search "abortion" I get a sampling of search results that has the greatest co-citation... instead of something that myopically focuses on Google's perception of my preferences.

At the least, I'd like to be able to switch off the personalization. But anyway... Beating a dead horse here in this community, I'm sure.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#36

Post by ako » Sat, May 04, 2013, 5:19 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…

I almost never search for very specific terms, most of my searches are also approximate. In this case it's very helpful that the search results are also approximate.

So I consider this a feature not a bug...

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#37

Post by esahione » Sat, May 04, 2013, 5:19 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #32

ot wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Really? I don't think so. For one, Kurzweill DOES have "grand" ideas. Extravagant visions of a future with technological immortality, singularity, etc. Hofstadter does not. He merely examines some things, like cognition, and proposes some theories about their workings. Like, you know, every scientist. Kurzweill comes out as grandioze, obsessive and deluded, Hofstadter like a normal writer, no more or less strange tha…

Except that Hofstadter, other than writing about his ideas and theories, has accomplished jack shit.

Pragmatically speaking, Kurzweil is miles ahead of Hofstadter in terms of putting his theories and ideas to practice.

It's very easy to criticize visionaries, until they achieve something. Then nobody holds the critics accountable for their negative attitudes towards the visions, and the critics probably would claim that the progress was obvious (in hindsight everything is obvious).

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#38

Post by ams6110 » Sat, May 04, 2013, 5:21 PM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #29

comex wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 want…

Whatever the reason. It has changed recently and is annoying. Search for "vertx play framework" and the last two search results don't have the term vertx despite pages and pages of results with the term. I don't understand how dropping search terms can make the results more relevant. Also you can't set the default search to verbatim. You can only hack the query parameters in specific browsers.

It has probably been tuned to the "average" person who is looking for entertainment- or shopping-oriented results.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#39

Post by rgrieselhuber » Sat, May 04, 2013, 5:24 PM UTC

Sven7 wrote: post #14

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 platfo…

I'm pretty sure that more than just a couple people work on search at Google. ;)

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#40

Post by Sven7 » Sat, May 04, 2013, 5:32 PM UTC

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #39

Sven7 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 platfo…

I'm pretty sure that more than just a couple people work on search at Google. ;)

More than a couple work at Apple too. But the 50 billion app downloads came from an ecosystem of millions of developers around the world.