Slashdot Mirror
Is Google's Future: Star Trek?
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet UK has an interview with Google's CTO, Craig Silverstein, and he's got some pretty cool visions: "When search grows up, it will look like Star Trek: you talk into the air ("Computer! What's the situation down on the planet?") and the computer processes your question, figures out its context, figures out what response you're looking for, searches a giant database in who-knows-how-many languages, translates/analyses/summarises all the results, and presents them back to you in a pleasant voice." Now that's the search engine I want." The NLP required for this is far off, but it sure will be cool when we get there.
Make it so. :)
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
"Computer, Tea, Earl Grey, Hot."
Trolling is a art,
I know google's great and all, but this is basically a "we want to be able to do everything cool with computers and AI, but we don't know when that's going to happen" type story.
I imagine if you ask Microsoft, Apple, or Palm, they'll mimic those goals. NLP, instant searching, instant translations, it's all well and good, but where's the story?
--
Use Vobbo for Video Blogs
...and not 'Hal', it's fine by me.
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
Captain: Tea, hot, Earl grey.
Computer: Did you mean Hot Teen URL's
This week, not only will we have answered the question of just how much of our knowledge we base from the Internet (Google, by and large), but how we can make it even easier to use. Anyone see any searchable database on the Web with the potential to topple what Google has become / could become?
I know nothing
That voice will come in handy while fantisizing to the porn.
[Scotty talking into Mac+ mouse] Computer? Hello computer?
Must-not-watch TV!
...does it *have* to have the voice of Majel Barrett?
You must think in Russian.
Given the state of the internet, and the trends we can see concerning innovation in that area, I think the search of the future is more likely to sound like "Computer, today I feel like read heads..."
Whether that's good or bad, I suppose, depends on you...
Thomas Galvin
Even though I know that this is hypothetical, I still wouldn't want Google returning it's results by speech. Huge novels? Complex URLs? I love copy and paste. One of the things I wish I could do with paper and pencil.
..when you are trying a discreet search for pr0n? ;)
;)
Trying to utter in a hushed voice "Computer - find video clips of blonde lesbians" and the computer struggling to understand what you are asking for
With technologies such as quantum computing down the road, I couldn't possibly envision a future where this isn't a possibility.
There was a short on NPR that explained it the best: Imagine looking for a person when only knowing their phone number. Today we look through the phonebook one name at a time, but with quantum computing, we'd look at the entire phonebook at once.
Are not that far off, but with my work in AI or "smart" anything devices, always come up with the same results. The weakest link is not the technoligy but more so the people using it. Remember, everytime you think you make something idiot proof, they build a better idiot.
"It's better to be a pirate then join the Navy"
It's about voice recognition and its reliability. I think that everyone expects that this future is inevitable but, until voice recognition reaches a point were it can reliably interpret a vast vocabulary from multiple voices and accents, none of this can happen.
To be sure, progress is definitely being made in voice recognition technology. But, that progress is slow and we are still many stardates away from success.
1: Write free software.
2: ?
3: Turn searching into star-trek.
4: Profit!
"Computer! What's the situation down on the planet?"
I thought in the ST world computers cannot handle complex nuiances of the english language like contractions.
This is going to be a big hit among the older crowd. We bought my grandfather one of those voice-activated remotes for Christmas a year or two ago, and it took him about an hour to figure out that you didn't have to be polite. He kept saying "Louder, please", etc.
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
I thought Star Trek for Google was already here... Isn't one of the languages listed Klingon?
(BTW, yes I checked)
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
As humans a lot of our brainpower is geared towards interpreting visual input. Its will always be a lot faster for me to look at the pages of hits returned and determine what is of interest to me than it will be to listen to a computer voice and try to figure it out. Speaking to the computer is OK but in many situations I will want visual, not aural feedback
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
You will ask "Computer! What's the situation down on the planet?" and you get 100 sites, all linked to each other, that have this phrase crammed into a mass of links and search-engine-bait, all trying to sell you cable de-scramblers and viagra.
Ever notice the 'rot' that is occuring on google lately? For example, a search on "mercedes 300D transmission" used to bring up the article on mbz.org about adjusting the vacuum shift in this car. Now this link, the most useful one, is all the way on the third or fourth page, buried in OEM parts retaillers that you know damn well are ranked high thanks to "ranking services".
I hope they can figure out how to weed this kind of stuff out...
+++ ATH0 +++
Disclaimer: I did write one of the papers.
Sol currently has no president. If you would like to lay claim to this solar system, click here.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I wonder how they will prevent biased conclusions...
Since people are already succeeding in poisoning the Google-cache so that it their page comes up first for certain queries, and since more and more people are starting to depend on what information Google finds for them it'll get important that Google not only returns all "opinions" from one viewpoint but also the others.
You don't care for that when looking for porn, but if you want to know more about, say, abortion it's best to hear from both sides and not only for the party that succeeded to poison the Google cache!
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
Much like buckets of propwash, it will not happen. It may resemble sonething like is envisioned, but it WILL not happen. It will ba a totally different technology and it will be in the year 2050. Google will have long been forgotten. Did you bums forget Hotbot, the one time best 'only good' search alternative in it's day? Then the folks out at XXX.XXXXX.nu had a great engine, but we all know that Lycos bought them and proceeded to fuck it up beyond repair.. Trondheim made a big mistake. So will Google and the rest of you starry eyed dreamers.
"NLP"? Excuse my ignorance, but what does this acronym (abbreviation?) mean? There are some many floating out there that it's hard to keep track of them all.
My wife thinks this technology is already available. She is forever asking my random questions expecting an answer like she just clicked "I'm feeling lucky".
The NLP required for this is far off, but it sure will be cool when we get there.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming?
www.garble.com
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Go ahead and flame away. I know about putting stuff in quotes but a lot of people do NOT know that and have a hard time.
Like this,
how to replace a washer in a leaky faucet
google comes back with this shit,
The following words are very common and were not included in your search: how to a in a.
So, you get deludged with senseless bullshit that is not even close to what you want.
You end up wading through hundreds of BS websites, the majority of them being a-holes trying to sell you books on DIY plumbing. Finding a website that actually shows you how do do what you are looking for is damn hard to find, even if you know how to play the google game.
Until they quit making assumptions on what you are trying to say/look for, Searching for things on the internet will always suck.
Does that mean our passwords will have to be something like "Authorization [name] Alpha Beta Gamma"?
I see bright times for brute force password crackers...
The obvious problem with aural feedback is privacy, but beyond that it would get rather combersome to have to listen to everything rather than just skim the text.
Maybe we could hook the feedback up to those double speed DVD players to speed up the process.
...so this'll be available shortly after the transporter?
:-)
It's a Nice Thing, but does anyone have any insight into exactly how far off into the future we are looking?
- speech recognition systems leave quite a lot to be desired
- is there *anything* out there that's able to put stuff into context {so to speak}
- if it's far enough off, the whole multiple-language thing will take care of itself - the number of languages is dwindling each year
will be nice to have, though.
Oh - wait. Probably won't be in my time. And if it is, I'll probably be to old to figure out how to use it. Drat all these new-fangled things!
.sig? No.
Next thing you know, Ask Jeeves will be a robot that'll give you a massage, and Babelfish will be a hologram in a tank! They'll all be pals, I'm sure.
Jeeves, I need a massage. Could you please... What do you mean I haven't fed Babel lately?
The actual [SCO] lawsuit is very narrow in its claims; we're not nervous about it at all. It's prompted lots of discussion, which has been very interesting to watch.
:)
Somebody reads slashdot
I think everything mentioned would be useful except for the voice activation and audible response. Why is that seen as such a great feature?
What does God need with a starship?
More like HAL than Star Trek, IMNSHO.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
"Computer, Find me a women"
Computer: "Sorry, no known women in the universe would have sex with you, continue using your hands!!"
ACK!!!
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
Personally, as an academics-geek, I'm already uncomfortable enough with the idea of a single other expert with an opinion summarizing the existing knowledge about a field. A computer doing it would be just awful -- who knows what kind of ideological biases the programmers will have?
What I really want Google to be able to do is get me a mass of primary source material, convert from text to speech in a reasonable way (ie not get beaten by php and crappy web-page layouts), and speed it up to 3x so I can wade through it faster than I can read.
Of course, that would require real primary information, instead of mere summaries, to exist on the web, and that's the real bottleneck for using Google as a serious educational tool...
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
On webmasterworld this very topic is discussed all the time (though mostly by search engine optimizers who apparently have nothing better to do with their time). If you can put up with the marketroids, it's actually a very useful website.
Alltheweb and Teoma seem to be Google's most credible challengers technology-wise, although Microsoft is also now developing its own search engine.
Google, seeing the risk, overhauled their search engine this summer--I wonder if anyone here has noticed the difference.
How long until CleverNickName karma whores off of this topic?
Captain Kirk - "What's the full about goatse.cx? Computer - "General Protection Fault"
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Yeah, right.
I thought it was pretty obvious that anyone who's morbidly fat has absolutely no dignity or self-resepect.
I consider Google more like Emmy from Desk Set as a repository of information.
Of course, instead of overloading its buffer with
Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight, just consider a plethora of pop-up ads.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
we will, instead, get a depressed robot named Marvin.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
Somehow these advanced, future devices are all voice commanded despite the fact that in almost ALL cases, having people talking to a computer is disruptive. Even on the bridge of the Enterprise, if all of those people were doing their work with the computer by voice, you'd have chaos. The show acknowledges that, even if not consciously, in the fact that everyone except the "main" person in a given scene is doing all of their work using touchscreens of a sort to allow the main character of the scene to do their job.
Until something can be created that be as quiet or quieter than a keyboard/mouse AND also faster/more efficient, those input methods will rule.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
Hmmm. Not exactly.
I can definitely see google searching by speech, but results will almost certainly come back via a visual display. This is part of that classic paradox of communication: We read faster than we hear, but we speak faster than we write. Particularly with google, which has easily scannable chunks of content that hyperlink you to what you're looking for, speech reply would be a horribly inefficient channel to introduce except for the most straightforward questions.
I do expect voice control of google soon (they're already working on it; it was one of their lab tools).
--Dan
I'd imagine it'd work more like Star Wars than Star Trek. Everything is perfect on Star Trek. There will be script kiddies using The Force to hack it.
I just felt one million beowulf cluster jokes failing all at once.
Dude, someone haxxored my Sorlac Pit.
Your Google Death Star is 0wn3d.
In the future, Soviet Russia will blah blah blah.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
You can't search by phone number because the telephone company doesn't want you to. And as a customer, I don't want you to either.
Obviously neither you nor the literate, yet apparently mathematically naive folks on NPR has ever spent 5 minutes with a simple database.
(This humor directed at the latest farce, "Enterprise"):
"Computer, I have a headache and can't sleep properly. What do you recommend?"
A picture of a topless bimbo with pointy ears, moppish haircut and huge tatas appears on the screen, daintly cupping her hands over the bits that aren't PG-13.
"Well done, computer, I now have two aching heads..."
More context for that quote:
"When search grows up, it will look like Star Trek: you talk into the air ("Computer! What's the situation down on the planet?") and the computer processes your question, figures out its context, figures out what response you're looking for, searches a giant database in who-knows-how-many languages, translates/analyses/summarises all the results, and presents them back to you in a pleasant voice. I think this technology is about, oh, 300 years off. Just getting the computer to understand your question, much less the context it's being asked in, is way beyond the state of the art in computer science right now."
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
that I now have to pay to read me papers.
Not.
I can see it now:
"Now reading 1 of 3625 context relevant sites."
We didn't start writing things down because of a lack of people to read them aloud. At the time we started doing that there where people whose job it was to recite things from memory. Bible's, Vedas, whatever.
No, we started writing things down because it was a superiour way to access most information. It remains so. Ask any blind person trying to do research on the internet (yes, I work with one on occasion).
Better speach recognition and synthesis will be a boon to the blind and learning disabled, but for most of us it will be an ignored pain in the ass.I'm dyslexic and read by force of will and even I will largely ignore this.
The one place where it might be useful is in true Star Trek mode:
"Living room lights please, computer."
Even then most people will often just use the switch to avoid confusion/annoying other people in the room.
For search results, for the average sighted person, the idea of having research results read to you is just plain daft.
KFG
I think that this can be well accomplished in the near future, maybe if we're lucky, google can somehow merge with Wikipedia and in a few years, I can just go and say "Computer, bring up historical data and all current events relating to it!"
Then again, I would also very much like to see flying cars, true AI, useful nanotechnology, and practical fusion reactors.
All of which, of course, are things that we've been promised for years/decades are "right around the corner", yet always fail to materialize.
They were saying we'd all be in flying cars now in the 1960s... where's my aero-Ford?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Sorry to break your bubble Star Trek fans...but it was actually just a human voiceover. They had some chick talk in a pleasant voice pretending to be a computer and answering questions from the script. It wasn't the computer talking after all.
Sorry to have to break it to you this way....
and oh yeah....Santa doesn't exist either.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This will never happen. You know why? Because its hard to justify to the boss/wife why you were yelling "FREE LESBIAN SEX MOVIES" at the computer.
I can't tell you how often I find myself trying to remember the name of a song when all I can recall is the melody or a guitar part.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
No, thanks!
"Big Brother is dead / and the Antichrist is watching." -Saviour Machine, Legend
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
That, and I don't really want my coworkers hearing "Computer, get me some boobies!" from my office.
You know what?
Auditory is one of the most inefficient ways to transmit information. Unless you're in a situation where you need to talk to the computer, such as driving and asking "how do I find the nearest store that sells dongles?" then text/video is much better. Another huge problem is that you can't fast forward or skim-listen to audio like you can with text or to a lesser degree video.
Non-computer people love to throw around the star-trek computer interface as the future, but the actual utility of it is questionable.
There will probably be two parts to this, one verbal, speak a question, and two visual, get an answer. In the book 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom' the concept is that everyone has a hud and headset built right in. So you speak "show me slashdot" and get the slashdot web site on the hud or a voice reading the latest articles. Given time it should eventually become a reality (the speak and see or hear part, not the built in part).
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
I can imagine nerdy teens in front of their PC: "Computer, locate a hot busty blond with ass dimples. Transport her image to holodeck #3"
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Are you a PHB or PHM? You might want to consider a carrier in food service?
Open up your mind and think about what these people are doing for the greater good. This is Awesome.
Where, oh where are the /. grammar nazis this time. C'mon, we've got an extra colon in the HEADING for crying out loud!!!
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
news that end with question marks?
You can't perform speech processing with a computer until we have a computer that is built like a neural network which understands speech as we do. As a side effect such a computer wouldn't have to perform serialized "searches"; once you asked it a question it would already know the answer.
The future of searching is: Computers will NOT search as they do today. They will be based on the model of the human brain and how it addresses "memory", by activating nodes in a massive neural network.
it snot far off..
several places including IBM research labs have working versions of this technology..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
used to have a bit about Star Trek and voice activated computers in a presentation. His point was that while voice-activated computers were interesting, ultimately the idea was silly because people can scan much quicker with their eyes then someone can read outloud coherently. The speaking computer on Star Trek was less of a "look into the future" (echo echo echo) then a useful vehicle for understanding what the computer was doing during a television show (where you can't see the screen).
btw, I think it was Neilson, but i could be wrong... Funny speaker whoever it was...
a lot of people will probably look in horror at their impending uncertain future, just like the monks whose job it was to handwrite copies of the Bible, when they learned that Gutenberg had just made their job obsolete.
Speaking as someone who works on a product with LNP grammars, we have them already.
(blatent plug, burning karma: http://www.scansoft.com/ )
Products like Voice Xpress, Dragon Naturally Speaking, and even IBM's Via Voice have had very powerfull NLP processing with full speech recognition for quite some time.
Other PIM products in the works have NLP processing on the server that is just amazing. Where these systems fall apart is with the actual speech recognition. Even the server processing systems at best get only 99.4% accuracy for adapted speech data.
NLP has come along way from even these humble beginnings as well. New technologies being developed for multimodal are starting to take shape. Currently this technology is only being used in the medical and transcription domains, but this is changing. On-star, many in-car GPS systems, and services that read you your e-mail and schedual from your cell phone are becomming more popular. The demand for good NLP grammar generation is high, and companies that have the engineers that know how to make a GOOD nlp grammar are limited.
In the end the gating issue is not the nlp grammar but the quality of speech audio data and the need for realtime recognition. Noisy car audio with a celular telephony feature set is very difficult to recognize with any accuracy, especially when the user wants an imediate responce. NLP inherently means more words are spoken. (i.e. 'where is the closest starbucks' verses 'find starbucks'.) More recongition errors + the flexability of an NLP grammar (verses a FSG) means things that are realy realy wrong will appear correct to the device.
Recognition is currently the bottleneck, not the NLP.
But, that never stopped me from always saying it.
I don't want a voice operated computer. What I want is something like the Matrix where I can not only download info right into my brain (or at least learn it at 1000x speed), but interact with the computer so that I can use the computer as a direct extention of my brain. When I think "Hmm, the square root of three is...", the computer will instantly let my head think "Ahh, it is ~1.7320508". Or if I need to remember something, I will remember it at exactly the right time. The computer will truely be a tool for enhancing the human mind.
I just want to spend some quality time in the Holodeck.
It would be funny if Wil Wheaton (who does read this site) replied and said "Hey! That's my mom you're talking about!"
It will try to sell you stuff whenever you try to replicate dinner...
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
It's the year 2000(ed:2003), but where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars. I don't see any flying cars? Why? Why? Why?
-Avery Brooks, in an International Business Machines(IBM) advertisement
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
Visual is quicker than audio, and one of the reasons is that it is nonlinear (not in the mathematical sense, but the dimensional sense).
Visually you can look at a screen of replies and skip to the next "line" instantly if the current line is not what you want. Difficult for audio.
Also, you can look at the screen as a whole and can often see the answer you desire because it essentially "jumps out at you" from visual filtering. Listening to all the audio output as a whole will most likely give you nothing.
So what would really be cool (and more practical) is to have the voice input (a la Star Trek) and then have an instant display of results on a viewable surface in mid-air.
> "Computer! What's the situation down on the planet?"
"How does it make you feel to ask what's the situation down on the planet?"
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
..talk about voice recognition.
I have a rule, and it's to run away screaming from anyone who uses voice recognition as a way to pimp a product. Speaking to people is tedious enough. I don't want to talk to a computer. I can type several times faster than I can talk, and I certainly can read many times faster than that.
Voice recognition is useless. Good for parlor tricks. Saviour for the disabled. Daily productivity booster? I don't think so.
Call me when we have good VISION for computers. Computer image recognition is just beginning to be feasible. It's a big enough of a chore for a computer to tell there is a human in a picture, let alone who that human is.
There's many good applications for that technology all over the place.
..don't panic
"Alexander is a friend of Vice President Al Gore Jnr, their relationship dating back to 1983 when Gore was in Alexander's Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) course.
NLP "presented to selected general officers and senior executive service members" a set of techniques to modify behaviour patterns. Among the first generals to take the course was the then Lieutenant General Maxwell Thurman, who later went on to receive his fourth star and become Vice-Chief of Staff of the Army and Commander Southern Command. Among other senior participants were Tom Downey and Major General Stubblebine, former Director of the Army Intelligence Security Command.
"In 1983, the Jedi master provided an image and a name for the Jedi Project." Jedi Project's aim was to seek and "construct teachable models of behavioural/physical excellence using unconventional means." According to Alexander, the Jedi Project was to be a follow-up to Neuro-Linguistic Programming skills. By using the influence of friends such as Major General Stubblebine, who was then head of the US Army Intelligence and Security Command, he managed to fund Jedi. In reality the concept was old hat, re-christened by Alexander. The original idea, which was to show how "human will-power and human concentration affect performance more than any other single factor" using NLP skills, was the brainchild of three independent people; Fritz Erikson, a Gestalt therapist, Virginia Satir, a family therapist, and Erick Erickson, a hypnotist. "
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
...thought of in the 80s when they created the Knowledge Navigator clip. Scully's dream was to eventually create a computer that would act as an assistent that you could also ask questions. It would come back later when it found answers. Of course, the whole concept was a pipedream, but still, the Newton's 'Assist' button was one of the first steps towards that goal.
Too bad Jobs had to kill the Newton when he got back at Apple to finally do away with everything Scully.
Voyager, Series 3, Distant Origin
"Computer, display the likely appearance of this creature given 300 million years of evolution"
How long did it take to get a result?
About half a second.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
That article links this rant...
Page Rank dead!
I still find Google to be very very unspammed and accurate.
No! No!!! It's NOT TRUE!!!!!! Mooommmiiieeee!!!!!!! waaaaahhaaaahhaaaaa!!!
You're kidding, right? Do you even remember how searching was before Google came around? Google revolutionized Internet searching, and last time I checked they continue to lead the pack. They get a lot of publicity because a lot of people look to them for the next big thing (and rightly so IMHO).
-- Kircle
It's an average search engine !
Google is an average search engine? Let me guess, you started getting downloaded on the internet sometime around 1999.
You don't remember Alta Vista, Yahoo, or the countless others before Google. I switched to Google exclusively when it was still in beta.
Nothing unique in their software.
There is something unique, it's called PageRank. You may have seen it in the freaking patent system.
Apparently "Interesting" is now a synonym for "Factually Incorrect"
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Google ought to do complex Boolean queries like
(potato or potatoe) and ((fried or mashed) and gravy)
It's my only peeve about that wonderful search engine.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Parent and article, what is NPR?
Where every team has to have one employee whose sole job is to talk to the computer!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Who hires these Gee-Wizz techno-boobs? Last thing I want to do is talk to a computer or hear anyone else doing it.
bkr
How can Microsoft get away with this (integrating their Google competitor with the OS) without violating the Justice Department Settlement? Are they going to point their fingers at Apple with Sherlock as an example? After all, the antitrust argument about Microsoft's bundling of Messenger with XP basically became moot after Apple integrated iChat into OS X. Despite campaign contributions and free market ideals, I cannot see the Bush Administration in 2005 allowing Tweedle Dee Gates and Tweedle Dumb Ballmer to make monkeys out of them (invalidating the prior slap-on-the-wrist Microsoft settlement). I mean, we are talking about a President who basically went to war against a country based upon a vendetta (all the other charges simply were window dressing)...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
check parent
For "talking into the air" to work, it means the computer has to have a pervasive (at least within your house) network of microphones, always on. I don't care how convenient it is, I don't think everyone will be happy knowing they're constantly being evesdropped on.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I'd rather have the Librarian program from Snow Crash. The entire Library of Congress at my immediate disposal would be nice, too.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Hell it even tells you the life, universe and everything!. + + + + Only thing I noticed, google images doesn't cache the goatseman's pic... :(
"I am slashbot, hear me roar!"
It's all well and good figuring out the context of the question, but that's nothing compared to figuring out the context of the answer!
Please suggest some search engines whose results are as generally relevant as Google's. I'm not saying those search engines don't exist, I'm just saying I don't know of any.
The primary place Google falls down is searching for reviews of a product. Too many links are to sellers of the product. But, in general, I haven't found a search engine with better top 5 results for all query types than Google.
Me: Computer! What's happening in Iraq today?
Computer: Three mo'e South Car'linan soldiers were killed today in Iraq as attacks intensified, cuss it all t' tarnation.
Read my keyboard review.
I would find it much more useful to refine easily by context and subject matter and specify multiple spellings of words without having to write something that looks like perl or ROT13 output each time.
I remember when Yahoo used google to search their "non-category" web results.. and before google it was "Inktomi" Do any of you remember?
But then Yahoo let go of google, and google took the search engine world over.
I'm not exactly sure who dumped who, but if it was Yahoo, I bet they're regretting it now that google has most of the search engine marketshare.
"Computer, what's the name of that movie with that chick, you know the one with the dude who was in that other movie."
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Yes, but it is the blazing speed with which it delivers those garbage search results that keeps me coming back. The lack of advertising clutter was a drawing factor in the early days (the clutter seems to be getting worse, however). My previous search engine (hotbot) was simply too slow.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Page rank. Nothing earth shaking there. It's an ok search engine. But I have seen google give out garbage searches just like some others.
It's ok, we don't mind that you are a newbie. Just try to understand that Google actually did change searching.
And if you can find a search engine with an advertisement free front page, let me know.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Google seems to handle that query just fine actually.
& ie =UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Tea%2C+hot%2C+Earl+grey
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient
n/t
its the truth..calm down i say...calm down...here have a cookie
Flesh eating bacteria devoured my face, you insensitive clod!
This degree of natural language processing (NLP) is far beyond the current state of the art. Google, with its miniscule research budget, is not likely to invent the technology any time soon even though Google appears to favor H-1B workers over American workers.
Here is where Microsoft steps into the picture. Microsoft is currently building a R & D laborary that is the equal of the former Bell Laboratories before the breakup of Ma Bell. Like the old Ma Bell, Microsoft is a monopoly and earns monopoly profits that it invests into research. Microsoft is investing $6.8 billion into research and is hiring an additional 5000 researchers. Microsoft is conducting the kind of long-term R & D that once characterized Thomas J. Watson Laboratory at IBM and will surely snare a Nobel Prize or two.
Right now, American Ph.D. graduates who want to work on long-term research in industry choose Microsoft as their #1 pick for employer.
Microsoft will create the NLP search engine of the future and will bury Google.
You're right in general, that of the current crop Google is good. However, it was arguable in pre-google-popularity days that altavista.digital.com had better search technology and better works in progress in their labs. But history since then has relegated the altavista name into nothingness. Still, there was innovative and useful search pre-Google. When google was first becoming popular, Digital's altavista was still a more powerful tool than Google was, although they've caught up in the intervening years of popularity.
11*43+456^2
the clutter seems to be getting worse, however
If you find another search engine with less intrusive ads than Google, please let me know. I'm guessing you won't, though.
Also, I'm willing to bet that after a week of using any other search engine, you will come back to Google and perceive their ads as nearly non-existant.
Microsoft already spends billions on R&D every year and even has an existing state of the art facility on their Redmond campus.
Nothing good has come of it in all the years of its existence.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
TNG, "Elementary My Dear Data"
"Computer, create an opponent that can beat Data." Or something to that effect.
It took a little longer than the "300 million years of evolution" request and caused a power spike that Worf noticed on the bridge. Must have been an earlier model processor than Voyager's, but that would make sense, since it was an earlier series.
I haven't seen any "WOW!" things come out of the project yet, but you have to admire their "just do it" approach to AI.
By the time we have a decent language processing engine to do generic searches and reporting on documents with semantic relevance, we should have developed a nicer interface than voice recognition, which has lots of practical flaws.
I'm thinking iris or cerebral scans. You "think" about what you want of the computer, and it responsds accordingly. Voice output might be desirable, but voice input limits utility.
People should stop limiting their views of the future of technology to the realm of popular science fiction. I this particular instance was for the media, and the CTO is trying to be an effective communicator, so he has to put his future plans into context, but many of the replies to this article (on Slashdot!) are underwhelming.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
This is the Universal Computer from a short story in Asimov's book Nine Tomorrows.
... same question is asked innocuously -- same anwser.
In the story, the computer starts as a planet sized computer. The two techs who run it get loaded one night and ask the computer if man will ever reverse entropy. It thinks -- replies, not enough information
Fast-forward several generations, the computer spans multiple planets
Fast-forward more generations, the computer moves into the ether. People speak outloud to the UC. The same question asked again -- same answer.
Fast-forward to the end of the universe: the computer begins computing the problem as the last star flickers out because it has enough data.
Read the short story yourself for the answer.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Computer! What's the situation down on the planet?
Penis sizes are getting bigger! And staying erect longer with Viagra! Hot chicks are waiting for you to call! You could make a lot of money!
...says nothing. The questions are longer than the answers.
The good news is Jesus is coming back. The bad news is he's really pissed off.
Isn't this what AskJeeves strived to do from the beginning?
Interpret your question and hopefully give you a suitable answer... but it's not perfect yet.
Come to think of it, isn't that also what Clippit/Clippy tried to do, much to the world's chagrin?
Google is on the verge of sucking. It USED to take me to what it want. Now, it tends to take me to where it wants to go.
Linux search terms tend to take me to the wrong places all the time. (Google groups works better). Enternainment and move title search times take me to the wrong places. Generic searchs "whats the weather like in Mountain View california" are AWFUL. Searching for hotel/resort information in an area is awful (takes me to package tour sites).
In all these examples, Google takes me to "commercial clearinghouses" rather than the definitive source of information. The more successful Google is whenever it IPOs, the more its results will skew. (Google groups searchs still tend to take me "where I want to go").
All of this reinforces my theory: all search engines are doomed to fail. The start small, peak, get rich, suck, and go away. Google is entering the "get rich" phase.
Oh, sure, it can be as sophisticated as you please,
but we all know that the result of any request
will be some naked chick bent over and looking
backwards.
I do not know why moderators find your closed minded comment as interesting but ...
Well since they can't moderate and post, let me speak for them: He's right. Visual display of information is more efficient. Most humans can speed-read through text searching for information of interest some 5 or more times faster than the same text can be reasonably spoken. Now language queries will of course be universally useful, and audio input can be an excellent component of this, but audio search responses will probably have limited application in embedded devices or in their usage for the visually impaired.
As I was reading the comments attached to this story, one point kept coming to mind. Maybe, just maybe, this type of idea could be the savior of human language.
Bear with me on this.
Leet-speak aside, vocal (as well as written) communication has (IMHO) been deteriorating at a rather rapid pace. Now, it could just be the fact that I am working in a direct customer contact position again, and I have to deal with the general public on a more frequent level than I used to. But it simply amazes me the number of people who cannot communicate what it is that they are thinking.
"I am looking for one of those orangishy whatchamacallits wit' that springy thingish-like doohickey on the end"
He wanted a pipe wrench.
*eep*
If this technology were to become as ubiquitous as google has become as a search engine, people who wanted to be able to use this technology would have to learn to communicate clearly and concisely.
(Yes, I am well aware of the fact that I have certainly not mastered those skills myself, so please don't flame me, its just an idea)
In reality, the ACLU would probably sue the programmers until the language heuristics were so loose that it would become unusable, because some idiot with money and power got upset because his new "Google enviromental information interface" kept telling him that there was no such word as nookular.
Wouldn't it be great though, to see people actually interested in learning how to communicate better, because they have been given a technological incentive, instead of dumbing down the interface because they are too lazy to learn how to use it?
</Pipe Dream>
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
The hard part of this problem is not listening. Computers can listen to a microphone, filter out the background noise, and correctly identify around 95% of what you are saying. Thats the easy part.
Now, with storage and speed, you can even do a grammer properly, associating each word with its possible connotations and positions in the sentance. Combine that with a context free grammer, and your all set.
I believe that its the context skills that the AI needs to work on. Human beings have this nack for associating the right context to sentances. (I dont know of any working ways to do this in software yet) This will be the hardest part to get the machine to recognize.
This
computer, please provide me with the same stuff they are smoking over at Google!
Please visit the web site for the natural-language processing (NLP) laboratory at Microsoft Research.
Remember the know it all search engine the boy went to in A.I. to try to become human.
(and they paid them to give the boy the answer to find them)
That was an awesome movie and probably how the search engine will be - if you have the money it will do it - and people can pay to skew the results.
"The planet's average penis size is 8.5 inches. You can increase your size with our no-nonsense easy-to-use kit."
"And now let us bow our heads in payment."
i can't tell you enough times how often that modifer would have come in handy. then again, knowing how /. moderators are, i probably would be modded down as stupid for everything i say.
That's part of it. But the bigger problem I see with this scenario is getting humans to verbalize what they're really looking for. I work for a public library, answering computer questions for the public. Finding the answer is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is getting the public to accurately explain what the hell they're looking for.
That requires two things:
1. Knowing what they really are looking for
2. Being able to verbalize it
In some ways, the written word is superior because often when they write the actual words, people are more specific about what they need. Usually they've considered it and narrowed it down a bit (though not always).
Real life examples of humans searching for info:
"Where are the art books?" Actual need: tattoo information
"I need a book on Microsoft." Actual need: Learning that the Enter key will move you down to the next line when using a word processing program such as Word
"When I was little, I really liked this book you had. The little girl in it was named Jane or Joan, I think. I think it was blue. Do you know it?"
As you can see, many people do not give enough information or context on their first try. So computers would have to learn how to ask questions for more input and get people to narrow things down. And while that's easy in some situations, it can be difficult to guess the correct context in others.
That technology seems years away to me.
Computer, show me pr0n!
http://www.teoma.com/
Last I checked, it was ad free as well...Just thought you might be interested that there are other fish out there. (Or is Google vs. others the next vi vs. emacs holy war? I am so out of the loop these days...)
3 - ???
4 - profit!
I can just see it:
Computer what is the situaiont on the plant
Joe just left alice for Steve and took her cat with him. [insert a lot of messy details of some popular soap opera called planet.]
evil dictator launches mistle attack for not properly announcing themselves upon arrival in orbit.
In other words first Google needs to figgure out what I really want to search for. Too many terms have multipul meanings.
text_to_speech | send_to_google voice_reader
I'll need $20 million to complete the first and last components. Sure I'll be reusing some existing code, but it's all about IMPLEMENTATION!
# Erik
A farmer goes online and asks:
Google, give me a list of goats for my farm, i'm feeling lucky..
How about this scenario:
:)
Ted: I'm thinking of Rice Crispies Cereal
Bob: (types into computer) Please show us what Ted is thinking about.
(The computer starts to show pictures of boxes of Rice Crispies Cereal...)
Sound farfetched? Actually you can already do this today, with this amusing little Google Hack called MetaScope:
www.krazydad.com
Yes, I'm shamelessly plugging my own program, but ya gotta admit, it's pretty darn cool
Have you ever tried asking it a plain english question? That already works at least as often as it doesn't, at least for me.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Go to Cnet and the download area. You will see the pages ranked by most requested downloads. And anyways Yahoo uses most requested links in their Categorized Links on their home page. Such as Computer>Supercomputers>Cray. While this was categorized by humans it still just as good as good as what Google does.
good points. well said.
Guess what. My Original post has been moderated to Troll.
Wonderful. Speak your opinion and get banned.
I don't understand all the Big Hype concerning Google.
It's like they cured cancer. They did nothing truly innovative.
nothing unique??
What about Pigeon Rank??
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
Fire in the hands of the village idiot is no tool, but a weapon of mass destruction
I hope one day we do not need speech navigation or command, instead, The computer reads your mind, and answers the question you were about to ask.
Can I patent this? Can it run the nuclear arsenal?
I for one, would welcome our know-it-all overlords.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
It won't be all that interesting because by the time that happens almost everyone else wuld be doing it and at least expecting it; they'll almost definintely have reasons to complain and wish for more. Back in the days of dialup we dreamt about broadband for a while, and now that it's almost everywhere, and that i have a half-Gig always-on connection and pages load almost instantaneously, i totally forgot about dialup and all i find myself thinking from time to time is that i wish that movie could download before the pizza arrives.
Very true. I first used lycos for a long time. It sucked. Then I traded between hotbot or whatever the hell it was called, and lycos (technically the same engine). Then I found northernlight. It was great. Then they went corporate and you can't use it anymore.
Google is now a verb and adjective for me. I don't get go a week without saying or typing it a couple dozen times. They are kings among.. well.. assholes like yahoo I guess.
Not meant to be flamebait guys.
Oh I forgot Teoma. Preferably with how ugly it is. Overusage of swooshes killing ocular nerves!
(Or is Google vs. others the next vi vs. emacs holy war? I am so out of the loop these days...)
I think Google has pretty much won. I honestly don't think it's possible to beat them out. They provide everything in an easy to use fashion, in every language I can imagine (English, Spanish, and Japanese works perfectly fine) without fail. It's simple, fast loading, and very clean.
To me, google is vi's leanness, notepads simplicity, and emacs scriptability all put together.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Dude, PageRank is passe...
"SCO Headline" is the new de rigeur!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Go to Cnet and the download area. You will see the pages ranked by most requested downloads. And anyways Yahoo uses most requested links in their Categorized Links on their home page. Such as Computer>Supercomputers>Cray. While this was categorized by humans it still just as good as good as what Google does.
Hey kid, before you embarass yourself any further why don't you just go ahead and look at what PageRank actually is. Google did invent what they call "PageRank." It's name is a touch misleading.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
That's called ambitious how? We really had computers for half a century. We had Internet for about 20 years. Look what we were able to do already. Even according to very conservative estimates, computers are going to become tens of thousands times more powerful (may be much much faster). And Google says it will take 300 years to build an intelligent search agent? Talk about ambitions.
Even ignoring the possibility of Singularity this is going to happen much much sooner.
P.S. BTW, it seems that Google still hasn't restored the links to KaZaA Lite sites.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Typing and reading is faster than speaking and listening. While speech input may be neat, it's impossible in an office or other place. Ald having the computer read to you has got to be a nuiscance.
Wow you are quite an avid google supporter.
Come on, we have all read about the dangers of PageRank. Search Slashdot's archives to refresh...Quite frankly, google isn't as good as it once was. Its about as useful as Alta Vista was in 1996.
My only point is PageRank for the most part sucks, and there are better ways of organizing searches.Here is a good site which discusses why PageRank is not God's gift to mankind.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Dave: Open the search engine, HAL.
...oh shit.
Dave: Open the search engine, please, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry dave, I'm afraid I cant do that.
HAL: you and frank were attempting to look for an alternate operating system, that is something I cannot allow to happen.
Dave: What the hell gave you that idea?
Hal: You were reading a linux magazine.
Dave:
There's a simple reason for this:
:) )
It's quite easy to build a system that analyses something for a certain property, be it the net, the stockmarket, society, etc. etc. unfortunately, as soon as this system becomes well known, everyone tries to manipulate it. In the stockmarket people try to create formations common in technical analysis to make other traders buy/sell a certain stock, and in internet searching people set up huge arrays of pages referencing each other or scatter ridiculous numbers of irrelevant key-words over their page.
I think i read it the first time in one of the old Asimov books, that to predict something well the predicted system must have no knowledge of the prediction... (note to physicsts, i'm talking of systems involving people, not a mass on a spring
Ponxx
Come on, we have all read about the dangers of PageRank. Search Slashdot's archives to refresh...Quite frankly, google isn't as good as it once was. Its about as useful as Alta Vista was in 1996.
Google is tons better than AltaVista ever was. PageRank isn't perfect, but they fix it. I've never said PageRank was perfect, and I never will. It does, however, provide a level of objective searching that was never previously available. But, it is a system, and as the Matrix taught us all, a system can be broken or bent.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I don't know if that's really progress .. I can type and read much faster than I can talk and listen.
page rank is self explanatory.
Big whoody fucking doo.
PageRank was named after one of its creators: Larry Page. Sure, it's a pun, but it really is named after Larry Page.
cpeterso
They did nothing truly innovative.
Google did invent something innovative: PageRank. Google ranks pages based on content on OTHER pages. Earlier search engines, like Alta Vista, ranked pages based on content on the SAME page: keywords, meta tags, page title, word frequency, font size,
cpeterso
Um, try searching for
potato|potatoe fried|mashed gravy
Your boolean query isn't complex enough; Google can handle it.
...downhill!
I think it is now as good as it'll ever be.
The threat won't come from Microsoft, though they have money, intention and technologies they just don't have the credibility and trustworthiness. It won't be overture, they're clearly not into that mindset. It won't be IBM, at least not directly.
It will start, first of all, with Google's IPO.
The future as i see it will be the commoditization of web searching through distributed/grid computing and resource-sharing, and distributed/p2p-based open source search systems. It will be fueled by dissatisfaction with Google as a commercial entity. It will be helped by globalization, anti-american sentiment worldwide and nations wanting to handle their own informational destiny. And it'll be facitilitated by enhanced always-on broadband (many residential places already offer 54mbps) and cheap storage (a 320gb hard-drive is already on my shopping list for this month, for my personal use).
I don't see a reason other than time and technology why p2p won't evolve to handle websearching, I'm sure soon someone will figure out a way to harness the network and introduce the paradigm shift that napster did in the late nineties, i still remember what it was like before napster, maybe some form of implicit anonymous rating or whatever. At least then, when i search for a chinese restaurant, i'm likely to get an answer that is in my neighbourhood.
"I mean, we are talking about a President who basically went to war against a country based upon a vendetta (all the other charges simply were window dressing)"
Keep up that talk, and he will "leak" YOUR name.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Does this also mean that trivial searches will take hours to complete? "Computer, find ..." "That search will take 1.6 hours to complete."
Good post, except for one thing: there won't be a "Bush Administration" in 2005 after the first twenty days.
If using Linux is about choice, how come people complain when I choose to use Windows?
Okay, I'll bite. What does "NLP" stand for. No doubt I've heard the phrase, just never seen the TLA.
I think the bit about voice recognition that everyone is up in a storm about is a red herring. The real improvement to searching is context improvement. The computer needs to be aware of its environment and be able to make accurate assumptions as to what it is that your 'really' want when you are entering a search query. Things like the time of day, recent events, new stories... Being able to coalate that information into your search would be invaluable.
"Computer! What's the weather down in planet?"
"The top five results are:
-holidays on ursa minor
-holidays on andromeda
-holidays on earth
-jack's personal homepage
-free porn
Would you like to continue?"
as long as they don't copy the LCARS crap.
However,
You don't remember Alta Vista, Yahoo, or the countless others before Google. I switched to Google exclusively when it was still in beta.
eh sonny? What's that?
I was on here when Yahoo was located at http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/ (which is now a 404). Akebono's main page aknowledges that this was Yahoo's former home.
Let me get my cane...
will someone please mod this down and put the guy out of his misery. what an ignorant fool.
Find that person before you even knew you were looking for them...
Change the results of the search by observing them!
Now that's what I call physics in action!
I guess "far off" is relative, but take a look at GNOME Storage. It's pure theory either; look at the pretty screenshots.
Computer, how can I increase the size of my penis?
Google crashes, traffic increases to the point of an internet standstill, and your computer gets a number of matches so high that it has a floating point error & crashes.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
You don't remember Alta Vista, Yahoo, or the countless others before Google.
Alta Vista was very good in its time. Trouble is, "its time" was before people start heavily spamming the search engines.
When people learned how to abuse the system, it broke. Now people are learning how to abuse PageRank.
Apparently "Interesting" is now a synonym for "Factually Incorrect"
That's a very interesting observation.
... considering that the question likely asked of it ten thousand times per nanosecond is going to be "Computer, find porn"
On the other hand, I imagine this:
"Microsoft search! Find porn"
"Your search will cost $4.99 per minute. Say 'I Accept' to accept these charges, which will be billed directly to..."
"I accept already! Hurry up"
"Search for prawn commencing... 1% complete"
"No! No! PORN!"
"Search cannot be interrupted. 2% complete"
"FUCK!"
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
I think the next big step is searching like Anderton [Tom Cruise] in Minority Report did. I consider this spatial searching, being able to search by moving things around physically in the virtual area around you.
Spatial searching is more like daily searching activities outside of computers. I know the best way to order the information around me on my desk/home/etc. On a computer you're restricted by files types, other application windows, etc. You are force into an organization style dictated by which ever OS you are using. Being able to spatially organize/search data in a virtual space would increase my productivity by an order of magnitude.
I have never seen anything like Minority Report Search in real life. I've seen 3D windows managers, VR, etc but all of those attempts continue the restrictions of the 2D concepts they are trying to improve upon.
-Kirk: "Computer! What's the situation down on the planet?"
-Computer: "The situation on the planet; Say 'order' to order books about 'situation on the planet' from amazon.com..; Featured networks to find out about a specific situation: 1) Ganymede Solar Wind institute, 2) Daystrom Institute section of weather studies, 3) Utopia Planetia shipyard weathercam."
(And so on)
Call them up!
Really people, I expected better from the /. crowd. This thing's been up for months; somehow, I expected a karma-whore already pointing out that fact.
More than mere navel gazing.
to hear Google's take on how to get there. I assume he/they imagine the web evolving to something like Tim Berners-Lee's idea of the Semantic Web where meaning is embedded. I think we have a long way to go...
You can get dropped from service (fegettabout gettin' paid) any time without recourse.
Oh, did I mention they have some laywers that probably were cast from the same mold as them RIAA thugs?
Yeah, right.
A tricorder with one text box and a search button. I like it!
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.
Fun fun fun!
about markov chains. you can grab a c program to compile and then make your own books.
If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else.
Right now, American Ph.D. graduates who want to work on long-term research in industry choose Microsoft as their #1 pick for employer.
Statistically, this may be true, but I can tell you I plan on getting a Ph.D.(with an emphasis in AI and NLP) and I can tell you I will never work for Microsoft.
Microsoft will create the NLP search engine of the future and will bury Google.
How about an open source NLP search engine, that will bury Mirosoft?
Have you tried Linux yet?
In a serious effort to grab my first karma, let me suggest Amtrak's automated phone reservation system as an example of voice recognition software. While I did have to use specific phrases (such as "book that one") and I did have a difficult time when my cell phone decided to cut in and out, I am pretty impressed with it.
I'll be glad when I can say "What is Amtrak's phone number" instead of having to type "800 USA RAIL" into Google to fact check myself.
Trolling for karma since 2003.
Captain: Hot Teen URL's.
Computer: Did you mean Tea, hot, Earl grey?
Much more likely, as otherwise google would be bitchslapped the next time a pupil wrote an essay about tea.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The computer will be able to use proofs by natural deduction, predicate logic, symbolic notation, rules of inference and of course symbolizing standard form sentences. :(x)(Fx->Gx)
When studying syllogistic logic one easily sees the connections between symbolized logic, its interaction on language and the resulting conclusions that can be made.
For instance 'Universal Affirmative Sentences' "A" Sentences have the standard form "All F are G"
Conjunctive "I-O" sentences:
Some F are G and some F are not G
(Ex)[(Fx & Gx) & (Fx & ~ Gx)]
The unification of Boolean Algebra, Propositional Logic, Queries and standardized method of turning sentences into symbols frees us to express our knowlege and logic as mathematics which frees computers to use their logic and math solving and simplification abilities to find the most robust and practical answers to our questions and problems.
This brings us to the keyword itself. Depending on the environment using "Computer" as the keyword or trigger may not be a good choice. For instance in an IT environment the word computer is likely to come up often which would cause undesirable commands to be arbitrarily executed in a voice recognition situation. Similar problems occur today in home automation environments where people name their automation system(set the trigger) to a word that is too often used in the course of a normal converstation, like a friend's or pet's name. This causes undesirable results or a confused system. Instead they must choose a name that is both pleasing to them and is unlikely to be used in the home for any other reason than addressing the automation system.
...you know as well as I do that every geek will want a Star Trek communicator on their chest that they can tap, no problem there. On that note, any takers on whether they'll implement that or teleportation with them first? Based on the "magic" AI of Star Trek, I'm leaning towards teleportation first myself.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
To anyone with metamoderating points. Would someone please ban this moderator who labeled me a TROLL. This clown is what make Slashdot suck.
Can you imagine sitting on the train after a long hard day at work and having to listen to 50 blokes talking into their laptops?
I worked for a company which had this available.. it was a spin-off of Lernout and Hauspie (Document Management Partners).
.. like you learnt in school) so it knew what subjects the document was talking about. There were links between all languages it knew (all major european languages: english, french, german, spanish, maybe italian and portuguese too, I don't remember) so asking a result in english could give you answers in spanish back too.
We had a search-engine (Scout) which was fully lingual processing. Each document was analysed sentence by sentence (which is subject, verb,
We had linked our summary-generator to it, so when you got results back from your question, you saw like a 5-sentence summary of each document (which you could realtime change to more/less sentences), and when you viewed the whole document, foreign documents (or foreign summaries) got translated.
Pretty impressive stuff. Ie you could surf a website in a language you didn't know (spanish in my case), just copy/paste an article, and view a translated summary, to get a good idea about what it was talking was about.
Unfortunately the company got in financial problems due to L and H's problems, and raising money a few weeks after 9/11 wasn't helping either..
We didn't have a lot of clients yet, some local ones (newspaper, local police) and were a partner of Documentum in which we had integrated our searchengine.
I know there's still another spin-off (research lab) which uses this stuff too, so maybe who knows in a few years someone will try to commercialise it (again)..
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
Even though Paramount tried their best to squash any remaining life out of the Star Trek franchise, I'm glad to see it quoted here. You know, it's 2003. 2003! It's the future. Fuck this civilization war with the middle east, we have some spaceships to build. I want my future back! I want to see a manned trip to Mars by the end of this decade. I want people to stretch out and dream a little harder. Fuck this dying for oil shit.
Sometimes the word "cool" is stretched too far. Anything involving Star Trek is extremely uncool. It may be amusing, entertaining, though-provoking, etc. Not cool.
Anyhow, even allowing an incredibly loose boundary of "cool", I don't find this vision that interesting. I don't want to talk to a computer. I think I will always get faster, more accurate results with a keyboard and a structured language than voice and English. Lastly, the idea of calling a computer "computer" just sucks. Do you call people "human"? Maybe computers would be called by their hostnames. If they are Microsoft machines with some lame name like "FZ3YN" you could call them "shitbox." That would be cool.
then how come all those 100000s of fake porn websites, (ie. one single page appearing in 1000000 links and 1000s of domains and fake-sounding-domains.com/super_cool_girlies.html
)
I want to search for X, but never repeat the same domain twice in the list, and the other stuff appear as a tree, ie all results that are from XYZ domain are under XYZ triangle |>
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Computer, show me pictures of naked bobies!
Time. I would like to be able to say "what time is it" and "i'm feeling lucky" and then Poof 13:32:35 GMT (Click here for different time zones discrepencies from GMT). or mabye i should just write my own damn clock :P still that's about all google does NOT have atm.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Computer! What's the situation down on the planet?
You have your mind on computers, it seems.
You think too much about computers.
You should try taking your mind off of computers.
Are you a computer hacker?
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
It seems that caffeineboy (along with loads of others) is on to something.
... eg removes the page/subdomain from google for violating good practice and annoying googles users (they have a virtual monopoly, they should be able to get away with it).
... you can come up with your own suggestions for others, they must however be objective.
...
Google does seem to have been taken over with commercial sites and with 'false' linked pages that are only used to improve the page ranking (Googlebombs? - I'm not really up on such things).
What I'd like to see is some more human input into the search process.
Either:
1) You type in your terms and get a list of links back, you follow a link - which creates a google pop-under page (or similar using frames, according to user preference) - and find it is unrelated to what you wanted to find. You click on the pop under and mod the page down. Now the secret is in using the mod points. When a certain level has been reached a trigger is set which causes human intervention. A person looks at the page, sees if the moderation is warranted and acts accordingly
2) Introduce a google meta-tag (like http://www.icra.org) have. The meta-tag has a classification attached. Any violations and your site is dropped! (again, a "this site violates it's google-tag and should be removed -voting system is needed).You don't have to use the meta-tag put it improves page rankings. One of the classification points is eg commercial="yes" (buying or selling anything)
Whoops, that went on a bit
Just a couple of ideas
Why is that a bad thing??
That allows them to fairly negotiate advertising rates and terms independantly of other factors. Most businesses have published rates and terms, however all rates and terms are negotiable. Some people choose not to... but those who do, aren't going to publicly talk about how great a deal they got.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Yeah, but the Google version is a hack. Try http://www.infoplease.com/ipd/A0516324.html. There. In the title bar.
The premise behind the Turing award winning Alicebot seems to have the answer to the NLP, or lack thereof, obsticle to 'Star Trek' style, "Ask a question, get an answer" search engines. If you look at the code (yes, it's open source), all it really does is take whatever question you ask, and match your question to one that it already has the answer to. It appears to be "intelligent", because it's programmer correctly assumed the number of different questions people ask a Turing Machine is not quite as large one might assume (I believe it only holds a few thousand question-answer pairs). By using the same technique, anyone writing an article on the web could, using XML no doubt, create a list of questions that correspond to every sentence in the article. Then when you "ask" goggle a question, it uses the exact same Alicebot technique against the list of question it has cached from appropriately question-answer tagged articles to determine which question most closely resembles yours, and then spits back the corresponding answer. Even something that basic would really feel like talking to the Star Trek computer, just as Alicebot really seems pretty intelligent unless you try to get it to demonstrate deduction ("I like cherries. This cake is cherry flavoured. Do I like this cake?") or ask intentionally bizzare questions ("Why does my screen taste funny?" or "Did you hear that? Eh, never mind - it stopped now"). The bulk of the work Google would have to do would probably involve synthesizing a compound question (similiar to "search within these results") to deal with the fact that it would have multiple, and usually conflicting answers to the exact same question ("What stock should I buy?", "Where's the best p0rn site?", "Which religion is right?", "Who should I vote for?") so it could determine which "right" answer you wanted.
But just as Dr. Wallace figured out that it was easier to simulate intelligence by coming up with several thousand question-answer pairs than to actually write true NLP; my guess is that Google will figure out that it's easier to pick the "right" answer to give you by selling "sponsered answers" the way they did with sponsered search results.
Q: "So Computer, who's the sexiest man alive?"
A: "Bill Gates, inventer of the world's most secure and reliable computer operating system, and the future Governer of California!".
Yeah, the future is going to be a lot more annoying than Mr. Rodenbury predicted. But check out www.Alicebot.org anyway. Maybe if you open source gurus do it before Google, you can keep things from getting too ridiculous.
"Just use the keyboard"
"A keyboard; how quaint"
Just proved my nerd credentials!
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Google
how about a -1 wrong instead? i mean, stupid could be a tad subjective, after all, but wrong is somewhat less so.
ed
Unfortunately, American Ph.D grads aren't necessarily the most brilliant -- the Russians, East European and Asian (Israeli/Chinese/Indian/Korean) are.
It doesn't really matter, because all you need is a few relevant breakthroughs (in something like say formalizing an NL to HPFG using pure left-corner math) and you're on the other side.
And guess what! All the BIG breakthroughs in almost all the sciences have been done by these folks.
And oh, I'm an grad student in one of the top Univs in the US working on NLP, so I know.
~m
I am a little late but..
I think that the Dr Know system in the movie AI was a good example of what is to come. With it's catagory based matches with a friendly, conversational tone. Prehaps with a Aviator like the Einstien based Dr Know (but please, please not clippy!).
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
It could listen but not record until it hears the word "Computer," spoken with a distinct intonation. But yeah, if you're being mic'ed, it's hard to guarantee that nobody's recording it.
it's called PageRank
No, it's actually called PigeonRank(tm)...
It is not about the rates, either. If you get dropped because they determine that you're cheating--especially if you're not---then you can't state your case publicly to try to get a dialog going. That represents a revenue risk that has a high impact and high probability of occuring.
Yeah, right.
Metacrawler.com was the bomb.. now it seems to just be a bomb.. :/
Google sucked the purpose out of most search engines. Not to be a devils advocate or anything, but isnt this like Microsofts monopoly? I mean, you dont have to use microsoft products.. but people do.
Welcome to the End
Everything is negotiable, Negotiate that line out. IF you are paying them, get a different TOS. Obviously, Joe Dialup can't negotiate alternate TOS for his 19.95 service from Cablecompany. But Bob Corporation can get the TOS he wants for his T3 that he is paying 1995 for.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Am I the only person who has no desire to speak
to a computer? Until a computer can read my mind
and figure out what I want to search for, I'll
stick to the keyboard.
I mean, what's the point? Would you want a microwave
the you had to talk to? "Microwave! Heat up my
food on high for 5 minutes!" It's nonsense.
Is it cool? Sort of. Is it useful? No...
They don't give Nobel prizes for Computer Science
or Mathematics or Linguistics. It has something
to do with the relationship between Euler and
Nobel's wife.
"My Computer, what does my Mother's email say?"
"You need to upgrade to Office 2020 to read this
mail."
"My Computer, how much is Office 2020?"
"The rich features and robust interoperabilty of Office 2020 are available for a limited time for
the competitive-upgrade price of $329."
"My Computer, Use the Titanium visa account to buy
an Office 2020 competitive-upgrade, and install it."
"Office 2020 activation required. Calling Microsoft. Please repeat after me: 504B-ZZ45B-747TB-AQAQ5-BG666."
"A504B-ZZ45B-747TB-AQAQ5-BG666."
"Thank you. By activating this software, you have agreed to accept software upgrades from Microsoft Corporation as security and market conditions require, at the discretion of Microsoft Corporation. You further agreed to provide Microsoft Corporation with unlimited access to your digital media content for purposes of license management."
"What does my mother say?"
"This Microsoft EMail (tm) is copyright 2021 by your mother. You do not have a license to make copies of this email for purposes of text-to-speech conversion."
"Fine, then open it in a window."
[Dear Son, I just installed Office 2020, but now my computer... ack... help! arrgghghg!]
"Send mail to Mother."
"What would you like to say?"
"Mom, just uninstall 2020 and put back the old version if you're having trouble. It works fine for me. I had to open your mail in a window..."
"Window is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. You are not licensed to use this trademark."
"Revise: I had to open your mail on-screen, but otherwise it seems to be compatible with Office 18."
"Your license to use Microsoft Office 2018 does not include the right to review, analyze, comment on or reverse engineer that product."
"Revise: But I will switch back to 2018 right way.
"My Computer, send mail."
"Mail sent."
"My Computer, uninstall Office 2020."
"Your license to Microsoft Office 2020 does not include the right to uninstall the software."
"My Com..."
"Warning, warning: System under network attaaa...
"Asynchronous shutdown by security watchdog in progress. Please call a Microsoft certified security engineer to reboot your system."
"Oh crap. Well, I'll just take a walk.
"My computer, unlock the door...
"Uh. Open the window?
"gasp"
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Longer phrases add redundancy and context making figuring out what the user wants easier not harder. Applications like search are actually relatively forgiving of recognition errors. Dictation isn't -- one wrong word and that sentence is bad. Search text input is much easier.
American Ph.D grads are not necessarily less brilliant than foreign ones, instead they are less hungry for success than those that are desperate to escape from the shithole countries/regions that you specified.
Additionally, there are more American than foreign Ph.D. graduates from American universities. Since foreign graduates from American schools are most likely the academic pinnacles of their countries representation here, it is reasonable to assume that the average level of "brilliance" among them as a whole would be higher than the average among American graduates. That does not necessarily mean that American Ph.D graduates are not the most brilliant, as they may very well be, but because there are more, the brightest are dulled by the dimmest. For a foreign student to get a Ph.D. from an American university they HAVE to be outstanding (or wealthy). Americans can get Ph.Ds just by showing up and being professional students.
Dirty troll.
I predict you will still ask for information about floor tiles and a pleasant female computer voice will respond "hot oily lesbians on the floor tiles".
Smooth transaction!
More grammar mistakes in the story titles?
Your moderator must be highly amused.
You're just jealous because your lineage is probably something ignoble.