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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.
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
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.
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.
Well, Google's Voice Search was surprisingly accurate when I tried it awhile back. It doesn't seem to be working now though. I heard somewhere they wanted to try the voice searches in cars. Hmm, it'd be nice to have this hooked up to my microphone.
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.
Natural Language Processing or voice recognition
Actually the two are distinct but related concepts...
Natural Language Processing is the science of how to take a grammatical statement and parse it. Breaking it down into nouns and verbs and subjects and objects and whatever, and then representing the symantic links that describe how these concepts modify each other in a grammatical context.
Voice recognition is the science of taking spoken language and transcribing it to a context-specific computer representation.
The two technologies can be married, in that the context-specific output of voice recognition be a NLP parsing structure... but they don't have to be. Back when I was reading AI mags every week (about 4-5 years ago), all the voice recognition guys were outputing ASCII and all the NLP guys were inputing ASCII but that was as close as they got to working together...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
...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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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?
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
Please visit the web site for the natural-language processing (NLP) laboratory at Microsoft Research.
Even worse are the "search engine" sites that show up with just a copy of the search you just typed in... and to top it all, there are never even any matching links, paid or not...
...or the damnable epinions pages, with absolutely no comments or useful information.
Bastards. I wish google would just "mod them down" manually - there can't be that many of them.
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
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.