Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 114 posts

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#71

Post by jmillikin »

OGinparadise wrote: post #62
DanBC wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google better be really careful because Sadly, you are in a minority. Google's results are excellent for most people. I used to use + often. We know that the + operator was rarely used, and most of those times it wasn't used correctly. (Of all searches, only 1 in 600 were correctly using the + operator.) Being outside Google (and not able to see their data) is frustrating, but they have a lot of numbers and they do…

>> Sadly, you are in a minority. Google's results are excellent for most people. Sadly, you are in a minority. Bing's results are excellent for most people. Slap a Google logo and I'm willing to bet that most people wouldn't tell the difference. It's the Google brand that is golden, at least so far. But lately people are talking and questioning their honesty.

Bing's own comparison site "bing it on" shows that most users prefer Google's results[1], even though the comparison uses results modified to favor Bing[2].

[1] http://blog.paulnshapiro.com/bingiton-google-wins/

[2] http://www.punditpress.com/2013/02/the-bing-challenge-yes-it...

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#72

Post by taliesinb »

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. ;)

It's probably smaller than we all think. Google has a lot of products, even after graveyarding a large number of them.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#73

Post by taliesinb »

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…

This is a great point. Gabe Newell makes the same point about the gaming industry: the short-term view is that gaming is about selling units. The long-term view is that gaming is a cultural activity that can be monetized in an almost infinite number of ways.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#74

Post by taliesinb »

coldtea wrote: post #45

> How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google By rigorous hand-waving, as he mostly does things the last 1-2 decades?

I've been to a couple Kurzweil talks. He's got a good shtick, but it doesn't seem to change much. I tweeted "I saw this talk 10 years ago. Shouldn't it be 5 minutes long and 100x more interesting now?"

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#75

Post by taliesinb »

goloxc wrote: post #23

while Wolfram said that the bottom-up approach is the new kind of science

Wolfram and Kurzweil are betting on opposite horses here. I work for Wolfram, but I'd be delighted if the ML-approach works. Personally, I think we need a diversity of approaches to really understand how to crack the nut of 'hard AI' (if that is even a sensible thing to pursue).

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#76

Post by alok-g »

ippisl wrote: post #70

I wonder what would be the best strategy for google to monetize such an asset as ibm watson? Surely ads based model is not the best way(since they've already got a large part of the internet ad market and given that only google, ibm and maybe microsoft could build something similar. If it's a truly competitive advantage, wouldn't offering it for startups/other-businesses in return for equity would offer bigger profit…

My best understanding is that Watson would be too costly as compared to Google.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#77

Post by testbro »

harshreality wrote: post #69
coldtea wrote: post #45

> How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google By rigorous hand-waving, as he mostly does things the last 1-2 decades?

I attended a talk he gave on campus when I was in college, and afterward I lurked as some really smart people (grad students, maybe one or two profs) asked him for details. He came across as a con artist, selling ideas that he can't defend. For instance, one that stuck out was that he had nothing to back up his assertion that within x years there would be the ability to non-destructively copy all the information in a…

Kurzweil is awkwardly reminiscent of the connectionists of yore. I'm surprised nobody's taken a similarly hostile attitude towards his (as yet unsubstantiable) predictions.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#78

Post by fyi80 »

ippisl wrote: post #70

I wonder what would be the best strategy for google to monetize such an asset as ibm watson? Surely ads based model is not the best way(since they've already got a large part of the internet ad market and given that only google, ibm and maybe microsoft could build something similar. If it's a truly competitive advantage, wouldn't offering it for startups/other-businesses in return for equity would offer bigger profit…

Watson-ish system is IBM's medical diagnostics system.

and Google Search is basically Watson.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#79

Post by magicalist »

OGinparadise wrote: post #61
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…

>> As annoying as the approximation can be, I'd like a citation for "to drive ad views". Not 100% proof but ad views and clicks seem to be increasing by 20% to 30% each quarter. Google tests everything to death and they please wall st with those ad click increases.

If you look at the quarterly earnings reports, it's typically 20-30% year over year, not quarter over quarter. Keep in mind that the population of internet users is estimated to be growing about 10% year over year alone (though not always in places where Google is dominant), google's usage rate is still increasing in many places outside of the US, and then there's the fact that we all use the internet more every year, etc.

Besides, without any other data or even a clear mechanism of action, you could just as easily say they're just better achieving their stated goal of only showing ads that the people who see them are interested in seeing. That's supposed to be one of the benefits of the auction-based approach of adwords. 20-30% is a lot for that, but who knows?

Really, I think you're seeing a pattern there that you want to see, and I'll second comex's call for real evidence.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#80

Post by fyi80 »

dpatrick86 wrote: post #35
jaxytee wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

If only there were a way to predict that users searching for "taxi" tend to want local results, and users searching for "abortion" don't. You know, like that other search engine does, called, um, Google:

https://www.google.com/search?q=abortion

https://www.google.com/search?q=taxi

Or if you were willing to type more than 2 words into the search box before blaming Google for failing to read your mind, while you simultaneously tell Google to stop trying to read your mind.

Post reply on HN