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How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

forbes.com

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Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#81

Post by fyi80 »

coldtea wrote: post #34
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.

Well, if a drug has a dose in the ~200mg range, you can't physically fit many of them into one pill.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#82

Post by magicalist »

Sven7 wrote: post #57
nostrademons wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would "extensions" to search look like? Google had "Subscribed Links" from roughly 2006 to 2009, which would let users opt in to receiving links from third parties for certain queries (eg. I added a Javadoc extension that would show me the official Javadoc when I searched for a Java class). Nobody used them. Search isn't a market like mobile phones: it serves an immediate, well-defined need, and there doesn't se…

Your comment highlights the problem. When people think search they think Google. Search is bigger than that and Google is in a way through its success and utility, limiting people's imagination when they think about search. Just look at their menu bar...images, videos, flights, blogs, shopping, books, patents, apps. Is that it? Not to mention random. So we just sit around waiting for some benevolent god in Mountain V…

I doubt any "index" exists in the way the words indicates. It's likely highly custom for how it's accessed. What would an API for that look like? Do you want to just be able to do random regexes (that would be awesome...I miss code search)? Do you just want a disk sitting somewhere with all the internet on it so that you can run custom programs on it?

Identifying what a recipe looks like and then providing a search interface that can figure out which of the millions of variations of some soup recipe is what a person is looking for and is more authoritative than others (and not some blog spam with minor (but random) alterations, or written by an amateur with no business in the kitchen) is a hard problem. Crawling isn't really the hard part. It takes a lot of hardware and time, but then you have all this data...that's when the hard part starts.

I'm interested in what others think a useful "index" API would look like, though.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#84

Post by ippisl »

fyi80 wrote: post #78
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.

One application of watson is in medical diagnostics. They are working on other applications in finance, helping to develop drugs, predicting when industrial machines need maintenance and even coming up with novel recipes for tasty foods.

Basically, by reading and understanding large amounts of text, it can help you validate an hypothesis or even lead you to new hypothesis.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#85

Post by ippisl »

alok-g wrote: post #76
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.

They say now it's "a pizza-box-sized server".

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#86

Post by joe_the_user »

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 should be mentioned that this move towards approximate search also gives strong indication of how little demand for real "smart search" there is in the search field.

Alta Vista years ago had full logical search but Google beat them with simpler searches having greater relevance. Google's searches are now moving towards even less specificity. How much could greater language understanding help this?

How many people want to go to the trouble of writing out a full sentence to specify exactly what they want? How much is it worth accommodating them? etc

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#87

Post by alok-g »

ippisl wrote: post #85
alok-g wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They say now it's "a pizza-box-sized server".

Thanks. I could find some references using those keywords!

Do you then also know about the cost per query as compared to a Google search? Or alternatively, how much concurrent traffic can they handle with that server?

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#88

Post by nostrademons »

magicalist wrote: post #82
Sven7 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment highlights the problem. When people think search they think Google. Search is bigger than that and Google is in a way through its success and utility, limiting people's imagination when they think about search. Just look at their menu bar...images, videos, flights, blogs, shopping, books, patents, apps. Is that it? Not to mention random. So we just sit around waiting for some benevolent god in Mountain V…

I doubt any "index" exists in the way the words indicates. It's likely highly custom for how it's accessed. What would an API for that look like? Do you want to just be able to do random regexes (that would be awesome...I miss code search)? Do you just want a disk sitting somewhere with all the internet on it so that you can run custom programs on it? Identifying what a recipe looks like and then providing a search i…

If you just want a disk sitting around with the Internet on it, check out Common Crawl (http://commoncrawl.org/).

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#89

Post by ippisl »

alok-g wrote: post #87
ippisl wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say now it's "a pizza-box-sized server".

Thanks. I could find some references using those keywords! Do you then also know about the cost per query as compared to a Google search? Or alternatively, how much concurrent traffic can they handle with that server?

I don't know, but i don't think that really matters. google mostly deals the "cheap" stuff, while watson deals with really valuable stuff , so compute cost is is not so important.

I think there was a query on quora about this.

Re: How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

#90

Post by coldtea »

aswanson wrote: post #60
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genius or hard work will get you a solution to the problem you set out to solve. You need "grandiose, obsessive and deluded" in order to set out against a sufficiently ambitious problem. And you're listing people who have made discoveries. Kurzweil isn't trying to discover an equation or a law of nature, he's trying to build strong AI. That's a different category of endeavor. It's the work of Henry Ford or Steve Jobs…

Wow. Henry Ford or Steve Jobs. So, the discovery of the nature of cognition, a scientific endeavor that has stumped tens of thousands of the most brilliant people who ever lived for thousands of years, is on the order of setting up assembly lines and setting up shiny packaging for other people's engineering work. I learn new things here everyday.

Not to mention that neither Steve Jobs nor Henry Ford were dellusional or grandiose in the Kurzweill sense.

They were rather pragmatic and market based -- not foaming at the mouth for some pie in the sky tech of 2100.

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