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Google Wins Rights to Aussie Algorithm
rcbutcher writes to tell us the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that Google has just acquired the rights to a brand new text search algorithm invented by a University of NSW student. From the article: "Orion works as an add-on to existing search engines to improve the relevance of search and won praise from Microsoft founder Bill Gates last year. [...] Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the key word so the user can pick the most relevant."
Something like this could be used to check if the content of first posts is related to the story or not. ;-P
Google just bought your script before Microsoft could do more than praise it; I would suggest you duck before the chair hits the fan.
For some reason my fountain pen doesn't work here.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
The algorithm is a problem-solving computational procedure and is the building block for all search engines like those operated by Google and Yahoo.
...won praise from Microsoft founder Bill Gates last year.
No it's not. Otherwise they would've implemented it already. How can something be a building block if the thing they're referring to isn't built on it?
Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word.
Duh. Welcome to Google in the 1990's.
The results to the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts, giving the searcher the relevant information without having to go to the website - although there is still that option.
What was stopping Google from creating something like this before? Is it just me or is this being hyped just a bit?
That it's, enough said. Hope you got a receipt for that Google.
Man, all that time wasted writing simple "hello world" programs and number guessing games, and I could have been doing something like this.
*gives himself an uppercut*
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
You don't think that Gates would say anything publicly before buying all the rights if the algorithm were any good, do you?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
OOPS:
for (i = 0; i > texts.length; i++) if (texts[i].indexof(search) > -1) return texts[i];
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
Since when are "wins" and "buys" interchangable verbs?
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
First, it is funny how various countries are putting a nationalistic spin on it. Israeli newspapers are focusing on the fact that the inventor is an Israeli. Australian newspapers are focusing on the fact that he is Australian. Only the national newspapers are spinning this as "revolutionary technology."
Second, the description sounds alot like what Google and others do already.
Third, buying a single algorithm is not generally such a big deal. Maybe it is reasonably valuable. Maybe so valuable that Google paid ten million dollars for it. In the big scheme of things, that's chump change for them and for their competitors.
The whole thing sounds overhyped to me.
grep -i search texts/*
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
Mod parent up.
This is more likely than not the motiviation behind this move.
Even if google doesn't need this guy, you can be assured that Yahoo, Microsoft, and co. DO need this guy, and the fact that he may very well indeed positively contribute to Google's search algorithms makes it a good choice for google to hire this guy. In short, the risks associated with not hiring him are far too great.
I for one am glad that Google is finally acquring technologies relating to their original business model rather than their string of oddball acquisitions lately...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The algorithm, or search engine tool, is called Orion.
Way to reduce CS to the web. And that was possibly the most UN-enlightening article I've EVER read. Does anyone have a link to something with more meat??
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
So, this is basically Google looking up the search phrases in a thesaurus and then returning hits on those words too? Probably would help if I read the article first, I imagine, but I wouldn't want to seem atypical :>
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
Yeah, we could end up with a MS.
Let me guess. You work for MS?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You can buy algorithms?
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
For fuck's sake. I try not to be a grammar nazi, but I can't even conceive of trying to read something like that. Here's a tip: If your name isn't James Joyce (yes I said yes I will yes) or e e cummings (anyone lived in a pretty how town), try to follow some basic conventions of style and usage.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
While Mr Allon is the key person behind Orion, the university retains ownership of the intellectual property as it was developed within the university's research facilities.
Bleh, sometimes I think I shouldn't leave my house for fear of coming up with an idea where someone else can lay claim to it. It could be that he needed the computational resources of the university to develop the algorithm, but it's easily imaginable that the university could be laying claim to it when he was working without any real assistance.
I know that there are a number of issues around this (where do you draw the line?), but still - in general writing algorithms is a creative act, so they should belong to the creator(s), if it is even possible to own an algorithm.
There were fewer errors in your first attempt.
Do a Google Scholar search for publications in CS/EE, and you get... nothing.
His own web page is bare, with no details.
A Science Daily article from September 2005 (yeah, over 6 months ago) mentions this "algorithm", but scan details.
I highly doubt the novelty/effectiveness of this "algorithm" if it has been patented before being published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the key word so the user can pick the most relevant.
He got a patent for this idea. Is this really novel enough to deserve a patent? Perhaps there is more to it, than what is mentioned on the news sites, but these days I am so skeptical of that word "patent".
Yet again. Micro$oft shows they can't innovate and only buy others innovation with their monopolistically acquired money.
Oh, wait...
Mmmm.. Donuts
The "opportunity cost" to hire someone would be something like the 5 minutes it takes to do the interview, not whatever you're thinking of.
Besides, the summary says they didn't hire him; they bought the rights to use an algorithm he invented.
DATABASE WOW WOW
I read a book on the Google story a while back. What I remember is that when they came up with the algorithm, they worked with Stanford to pitch the algorithm to Altavista, Yahoo, etc. They wanted about $1 million for it but nobody wanted it. The Google guys just wanted money so they could scale up their experiment with more computers and storage but none of the big guys could see any money in search engines. Then at the prodding of the Stanford folks, they found a few angel investors and build up their company and the rest is history. So I guess the Google guys don't want to miss any opporunity and probably have a soft spot for these college students for when they were in the same place.
Anyone else read it as NSFW? Heh.
Do you even know what you're talking about? Have you even tried it? It works really well. Do a search for Foster's and the first result is beer, followed by sheila, shrimp on the barbie, and g'day mate. I don't know how we ever survived before having an Aussie algorithm.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Shouldn't that be
grep -i search the_whole_fucking_internet/texts/*
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
As you probably agree, it is not just a matter of convenience. If someone told me that I would be paid millions of dollar for any of the ideas/technology I have published about, I wouldn't have publish them in the first place, obviously. But of course, you cannot know about this before hand. So if you ar a PhD student, the normal situation is that you have publications about what you have developed. If not, how did Google learn about this algorithm in the first place. I mean, we are talking about academic research, where publishing is everything, not about industry research where secret is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer-Moore_algorithm
Not a bad algorithm.
I'm William Carlos Williams, you insensitive clod!
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
So what does this have to do with Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends.
For that matter, I live in an apartment complex named Foster's Landing and the road is named Foster's Way.
TSSIA
I like his initiative though. I wonder if he looked around at the current marketplace and thought "hmmm... so I gotta few years to research something... Google's looking pretty hot right now... why not build something I can sell them the end of it?". If he did, he's smarter than the average bear.
Actually I did a similar thing during my undergraduate degree in the early-mid 90s. I designed a very early back-end/database for a generic web-based online store. About 2 weeks into my project I got a call from a big record company (who apparently had heard about my work) and they bought it, despite it being mainly on paper at that point. I won't say who it was, I ended up working for them for a short time after I graduated, and as far as I'm aware, their site still uses the core of my code.
Did it used to be named Foster's Moon Landing? Are you an astronaut?
(This was the 3rd result of this search. Serendipity Now!)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
if(SearchText=='crikey') rank++;
Task Mangler
Since it sounds like he was a student immediately before, it sounds like a step up in his career, and the only possibly evil thing I ended up seeing here was that Google is taking on a tech with Microsoft praise.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Sign me up!
The guy must have invented something absolutely bloody amazing. I mean, it's not like similar technology hasn't been around for ages now (check contributions to the TREC (http://trec.nist.gov/) conferences. Some of the submissions reach a level of sophistication Google can only dream of. And the algorithms are published.
So, what's up with this "Orion" thing? What insanely great insight into language processing can a CS student have that whole teams of experts still didn't get?
How are the results of this algorithm any different than the results of search engines like clusty?
Yes yes, very clever of you.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
What does Boyer-Moore have to do with the mythical Orion "algorithm"? You're irresponsibly making it sound like this guy discovered something relevant to Computer Science, where he did not. The so-called Orion "algorithm" sounds like a simple heuristic from the poor explanations that we have. I doubt that the information it considers (i.e. the most strongly connected topic keyword) is not already part of the existing algorithms, so this Ori Allon guy's contribution is more like a UI improvement than an algorithm. If it is to qualify as a genuine algorithm it has to be proven to work correctly in a variety of useful cases that can be precisely described. Unfortunately, we have not seen any formal descriptions of it.
We get an obscure crappy article about an text-search "algorithm" and everybody posts a bunch of irrelevant comments concerning Google/Microsoft politics. Nobody even bother to question the fact that this algorithm may not exist? Where is it? What is it? Can somebody describe said algorithm and show why it is better, etc. It sounds to me like Google just hired some Aussie PhD student based on the fact that he did a little text-searching research work (what a surprise!), and everybody makes it sound like there was a million-dollar breakthrough involved. How did this not make CNN or Fox news headlines? Ohh, let me guess, the algorithm was TOO secret!
From the very sketchy descriptions, my guess is that this algorithm doesn't really have to do with search per se, but rather with figuring out what the multiple meanings or contexts associated with a term are. So, if I search for "American Revolution" the interesting thing would be to realize that that is a broad and many-faceted topic. So the cool thing for this algorithm to do would be for it to look at the search results which are returned, and then realize that some of the more specific aspects of the results might be:
battles political aspects leadership England and King George III
and so on, and then let you choose which of these was the best fit for what you are looking for, and show you the results which are related to that aspect, and then repeat this process on that subset, so that if you chose "political aspects", it might further offer you
Federalist papers Continental Congress actions etc.
The difficult problem, which perhaps Allon has solved, but as far as I know noone else has, is automating figuring out of these aspects.
Does anyone know of a more substantive description than the rehashed stuff which appears in 100 news sites..? A paper, a patent application, anything? Do we know where Bill Gates learned about it?
How dare you try to pull the rug out from another of our cause célèbres? See, Google is a big, famous, mostly American company, and they've bought an Australian product! That makes all Aussies famous and important and sopheeeeesteeecated! No, really, it does. Honestly. So stop trying to ruin this for us you ungrateful fuckwit, and keep saying nice things about the United States of Australia, because our egos need it.
Now watch this post get modded straight to hell by my infuriated countrymen.
... at least, not when they have terabytes of data to search through. While Boyer-Moore is an asymptotically optimal algorithm for non-indexed string matching, Google (and everybody else who wants to perform multiple searches against the same data set) uses indexed matching algorithms.
With indexed matching algorithms, you can search for a string of length M within a string of length N in M + log(N) steps -- far faster than B-M's M + N/M steps -- and you can even search for matches with mismatches (e.g., locations where the strings match at 50% of their positions) almost as fast as B-M (asymptotically B-M finds exact matches log(N)*log(M) times as fast as matches-with-mismatches can be found).
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
An algorithm is a mathematical object which anybody can implement. Or is there something I'm missing here?
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22foster's+landing %22+indiana
"This is more likely than not the motiviation behind this move."
You'd have to acknowledge that if Google starts requiring incredible license fees or outright refuses to license the algorithm to Yahoo, MSN etc. that'd be pretty evil, no.
Think about it like this: if MS did that, people would be mouthing the evil Bill Gates and his minions 24/7 over here.
Yesssss. He's wearing sunglasses. He is from Israel. And he has 'developed' a searching algorithm.
.. moss*% cough, long before anyone had ever heard of a Google.
Riiiiiight.
Somewhere in the dim recesses of my brain is a faint memory of a huge searchable database available to "certain Israelis" cough
>>
I am the director, and this is my movie
ha ha
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
>I'm guessing that English majors are generally more technically adept than engineering majors are grammatically adept.
That's patently false. The ability to write well is a major requirement in *all* of the math and sciences that I know about. I don't know that many people that make it through college without learning how to write well... although I suppose there are some. On the other hand, I might not be as familiar with historical English writers as an English major.
I actually don't know what jobs, outside of academia, that English majors have special ability in above any other college grad. I suppose the same could be said of philosophy. I'm not saying those aren't worthwhile pursuits, I love philosophy, but I just don't understand how people can defend English majoring on an "it makes me good at my job and I don't teach English" level.
Bart flicks a pocket knife open and closed repeatedly
Man: You call that a knife? This is a knife.
Bart: That's not a knife, that's a spoon.
Man: All right, all right, you win, heh. I see you've played Knifey-Spooney before.
yah, you know who i'm talkin' 'bout!
"Google gains control of software patent."
"Micro$oft said to have wanted to use technique"
"Software patents declared good by slashbots."
A method by which, when a search engine user enters keywords into the interface, the search engine first looks up all alphabetical words longer than four characters in the wikipedia entry of each individual keyword with a length of four characters or more. It then proceeds to sort all found pages weighted by the incidence of these associated wikipedia words. Alternatively, the search engine every so often sucks the wikipedia dry of its keywords per entry and uses the accumulated wisdom to weigh sorting of pages found by keywords given by the user (search engine caching). Additionally, other resources besides the wikipedia (dictionary.com etc.) may be used to find relevant associations for a keyword. Additionally, by using 'tagging', or click-incidence by the search engine user, the relevance of these alternate resources may be weighed in itself. Additionally, resources may be added on a dynamic basis by search engine users, where they start at the bottom of the list.
You must be new here...
It took a little while for me to catch on, but a pattern did seem to develop. That anyone could take this serious as it relates to Google suggests either as one who would latch on to anything anti-Google, or one who did not read far enough into the diatribe.
For example, substitute the phrase "the Bush Administration" or "the administration" or Hussain, or "the regime" and the ranting makes equal sense. There is no depth to the rambling though the buzz words had more meaning when put into a political perspective.
if this is the work of a random "rant" generator then kudos to the programmer for effort. I would pair down the paragraph size and work to make the ranting more poignant. I would have almost seen this as modded funny or interesting, but in the end it took up space and said nothing. Maybe a future political speach writer in the making.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
actually, you would search for "beer" and you would get Foster's...because Foster's is Australian for beer.
I don't have access to the patent applications as they were only filed late last year, but the the two relevant patents are:
Australian Application Number 2005906358
Applicant(s) Newsouth Innovations Pty Ltd
Inventor(s) Allon, Ori
Martin, Eric
Title A method and a system for facilitating ranking of textual information
Status Filed
Filing Date 16 November 2005
Date of Patent 16 November 2005
Patent Application Type Provisional
Australian Application Number 2005905853
Applicant(s) Newsouth Innovations Pty Ltd
Inventor(s) Allon, Ori
Martin, Eric
Title Methods and systems for facilitating ranking of an advertisement
Status Filed
Filing Date 20 October 2005
Date of Patent 20 October 2005
This makes me suspect that there is more to this story the SMH is reporting!
Automated DNA sequencing software
You don't think that Gates would say anything publicly before buying all the rights if the algorithm were any good, do you? :)
Besides, Microsoft's only been known to buy companies. This whole "licensing technology" thing confuses them.
--Jimmy
It's not very hard to keep up with /.
Finally, Bill Gates praised ORiON ??? Poor dude, didn't know what he was missing. I beat him on that one, by like 10 years. Now, what else am I beating him at.
Well in fact, gates praised thinking that google would knew that google would know that he was falsily praising the algorithm while he consulted his lawyers to fit the algorithm into some generical patent microsoft holds so they could add the same algorithm to vista. The problem is that google saw throw this charade and bougth it anyway.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
The latest high-tech action thriller from Robert Ludlum, The Australian Algorithm, is sure to delight readers with its well-researched look into the depths of the Internet search business, and the egos and conflicts that drive it. Recommended.
... Yes I did say ... no, I ... look, it was a JOKE, okay? A JOKE!
- ScrewMaster's Books in Review
Hello? Mr. Ludlum? Uh
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Your ideas intrigue me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
You do realize that:
(Oops, got carried away there.) For me, I happen to enjoy Cooper's Stout. Basically, from the sounds of it, Fosters is about as authentic as Outback Steakhouse.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
Wouldn't it be simpler and more reliable to just lookup the keyword in a thesaurus?
http://www.unsw.edu.au/news/pad/articles/2005/sep/ Orion.html
;))
It has a few details, but not that much info.
It's like the hilltop algo, just for text. (YOu don't need a phd to do this
Ok, I give up, I've been searching for about 5 minutes in those drop down boxes, and I can't find the -1 Stupid moderation. Since when is Google required to give up the algorithms that they developed at *any* cost?
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."
for a while. The idea of sifting through search results to find related topics has been done by at least a few companies (including mine), and these products predate this tech (which was officially anounced in Sep. 2005) so I don't think Google will be able to defend a US Patent on this.
If you want a demo of a product (mine, natch) that's been around in one from or another since 2004, check out Q-Phrase's ConceptQ Pro product. A free version which does just web search will be coming soon.
Here's a screenshot of a search of the entire 9/11 report, broken down into relevant topics.
And really, other than the novelty can, Fosters isn't really that good of a beer. Somewhere between Bud and Miller, (which is pretty darn low) on my scale...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
This whole "licensing technology" thing confuses them.
They innovate so much that they've invented everything in computer science. What is left for them to license? Automobile technology? Drugs? Swinging sideways?
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
What the hell makes me a troll?
Oh, I know: saying the truth when Google is involved is dangerous for your karma.
"Ok, I give up, I've been searching for about 5 minutes in those drop down boxes, and I can't find the -1 Stupid moderation. Since when is Google required to give up the algorithms that they developed at *any* cost?"
Since the patent system was invented. Did you know patents were supposed to force sharing of ideas (well it doesn't work like that today), and if you do not patent your idea, competition is allowed to reverse engineer it?
You've got it backwards. Patents are about exclusive control, not forced sharing. Once you have the patent, you have it for twenty years. Had Edison decided to be a total ass and refuse to let anybody else have light bulbs, it would have been his right as a patent holder. He could have strung his house up with lights until it shined like a tiny sun, and all you and I could do is sit and be jealous until the patent expired and anybody could sell light bulbs all they wanted. Yeah, he's a jerk. A jerk with electric lights. And you're a chump with a candle.
*hack* *cough* (chokes on his Boags) - What!!! Aussies drink Fosters??? Not bloody likely...
Assuming array texts has a non-negative length, your algorithm will not return anything. I believe you meant: for (i = 0; i texts.length; i++)
Australia's best-selling beer is VB, :P
now with extra activeX
Yes, I know that Foster's is crap. And i do know that Australians think its crap. Just like Corona is crap. But hey, we live in america where quality of product doesn't sell product, its quality of marketing...Put it in a celebrities hand or put a debatably naked girl next to it and you got yourself a winner. Our free market thrives on the gulability of the weak minded, self conscious.
As good as this algorithm sounds, it can be given enough false information to act like an idiot (or MSN Search). Imagine the fun if it thought pop-tarts were used in Vegas for poker cards and casino chips came in three flavors: strawberry, chocolate and smokey bacon.
A Not Safe for Work University... I'd like to join that!
He was born in Israeli. You can tell he is a real Australian becauase he looks cool (for a computer geek - compare with Gates, Jobs, etc...) and he can't imagine living outside of Australia for very long. QED
The algorithm is a problem-solving computational procedure and is the building block for all search engines like those operated by Google and Yahoo.
No it's not. Otherwise they would've implemented it already. How can something be a building block if the thing they're referring to isn't built on it?
I was confused by this sentence on first read as well, but I think the writer was attempting to explain what an algorithm is. So it should've read 'An algorithm...' or 'Algorithms are..'
Yeah, apologies for the tin-hat stuff. I'm sure his algorithm shows great promis, and will no doubt put him in the upper echelon of search programmers.
>>
I am the director, and this is my movie
Google has jumped the shark.
This sounds like PR by the Australian university, which is trying to gain maximum credit from one of its students being hired by Google. (This is a big deal in Australia, especially since we don't actually have a software industry.)
None of the press reports mention the value, if any, paid by Google, which is usually the first thing they boast about. Also note that the student has actually moved from the university to Google's campus, on his own. And he did it six weeks before the PR office thought about putting out a press release.
All up, this doesn't seem to be an acquisition of technology. It's the hiring of a researcher.