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New Company Seeks to Bring Semantic Context To Numbers
A new company, True#, is seeking to bring extensive semantic context to numbers to give them obvious meanings just as certain words have obvious meanings to most readers. "Most of us can probably recognize 3.14159 and the conceptual baggage it carries, but how many of us would recognize 58.44? (That's a mole of sodium chloride, in grams, for the curious.) And the response that would work for words — look it up — doesn't work so conveniently for numbers. Only one of the top-10 hits in Google refers to salt, and Bing fails entirely (though it does offer 'Women's Sexy Mini Skirts by VENUS'). Clearly, we haven't figured out how to make the Web work for numbers in the same way it does for words."
1337 returns EXACTLY what I expected.
I get one return for NaCl on Bing and nothing about miniskirts.
Cue the conspiracy theorists.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
...it returns "number of years it will take before True# turns a profit."
I'm seriously confused how many companies will jump at this -- and why someone like Google won't just do it for free? Couldn't you use Google Base for something like this?
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
In all seriousness - this is not a rhetorical question. Usually I want this information in the inverse order, not just having a number with no context. What is the value in searching in that direction is their some widespread need I don't know about?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
So, a search doesn't bring up what one person would expect and that means the search engine failed? Sometimes the problem with logical fallacies is that they are so big as to defy categorization.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Only one of the top-10 hits in Google refers to salt, and Bing fails entirely (though it does offer "Women's Sexy Mini Skirts by VENUS").
Bing seems far superior to my hormon^W^Wme.
Actually, the accepted weight is 58.443 thats why Bing didn't show any NaCl results.
Search58.44 and chemistry and you'll find what you are looking for a lot faster.
This will be much more useful if it allows for approximate numbers and widely-used but inaccurate numbers. "1.4 math" should return 7/5, sqrt(2), and a bunch of other things. "3.142857 and math" should return "22/7" and "approximate value of pi" and probably a lot more.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'll bite.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mole+of+sodium+chloride+in+grams - seems to work just fine searching for "mole of sodium chloride in grams" and also works without the "in grams".
http://www.bing.com/search?q=mole+of+sodium+chloride+in+grams - works for Bing too.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=sodium+chloride+molecular+weight - also works.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=58.44+science - "58.44 science" 6th one down. Better results from google.
Why would anyone just type in a number and expect it to know that you want the molecular weight of NaCl? If you add a little bit of context to your search, it magically works.
So, put in the (numerical) answer and it gives you the question?
Thank God Douglass Adams didn't know about this.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Need I say more?
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
How often do you have a number without units? Putting in "58.44g" returns NaCl, sodium chloride, or molecular weight in every one of the first page results.
Why in the hell would I want to search for a number with no context? Who thinks that way? Everyone remembers the concept, not the number.
You say "3.14" and people know it as pi. But if you said "pi," people would say "3.14." This example is only interesting because it's widespread.
Nobody would start with "58.44" and say "Hmmm, what does that symbolize?" No. They need to know the molecular weight of sodium chloride, and so they'll search Google for "molecular weight sodium chloride" and turn up the number 58.44. We're not computers, we know semantic context, and need numbers. Not the other way around.
Though I guess this sort of thing might be useful for some sort of numerical AI, who has numbers but no semantic context. Time to don the tinfoil hats, fellows.
For the number 420, Wikipedia's Cannabis information page comes up #1 in both google and bing.
3494.13
332
8494.354
2324.234
Hahaha, I kill me sometimes.
Get it? 332 ... 3494.13 -> 8494.354 ?
Man, that is too funny!
1. Eleventeen
2. 867-5309
3. 451
4. 1999
5. a gazillion
6. THIS MANY (holding up three fingers)
7. infinity minus one
8. approximately
9. 9/11 (may already be taken)
10. Top ten
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Marchex is a "domaining" company. They're the people behind those "What you need, when you need it" ad-heavy landing pages. They tried to buy up all the 5-digit number domains. (So did others; nobody got all of them.) This sounds like a similar idea, only less profitable.
When I searched "1234" on google and bing, the top results are about that Feist song. Thank goodness it doesn't mention anything about it being my root admin password and my luggage combination--hey! Where did my bag go? It was just here, and why is there a sudden spike in my internet tra#%^W&*s%!$AF{:
---[CONNECTION LOST]---
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Their example fails because they chose a number that has no significance on its own without including a unit of measurement. If you search 58.44 grams, instead of just the number, you get plenty of relevant results. And look at what happens if you take a famous unitless number from chemistry and do a google search. Again, plenty of good results.You can try it with the speed of light as well. A search for 3x10^8 yields nothing, but 3x10^8 m/s gives you the Wikipedia page for Speed Of Light. And as far as I can tell, Google gives you good results for useful numbers in Mathematics like the golden ratio. So I don't see what the problem is.
I came here for a good argument
Put in "58.44 moles" and you'll have proper answers in the top ten, putting in units makes all the difference for number searches.
And as for dimensionless numbers, 3.14149 gives wikipedia article for pi, 2.71828 gives wikipedia for e as top answer, even "square root -1" gives i.
Absolutely false the premise or conclusion of this article. Searching for numbers gives useful information
I have had this need when reverse engineering and debugging algorithms in software. There are magic numbers in the formulas and I have no idea what they mean.
Additionally, if something like this was rolled into a more generalized search algorithm, it could be used the other way around. Google could know, for example, that a paper with the number 58.44 a lot of times is probably about NaCl even if it is not mentioned explicitly.
The weight of a mole of sodium varies by location. In most of the universe the weight of anything is almost zero.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I typed "12345" into Google, and Google did not know that was the combination to my luggage.
If the search term includes "mole" as well as "58.44", the first few pages of google results are almost all for stoichiometry of NaCl. Nuff said, Google works.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
This sounds a lot like the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.
That site labels and stores integer sequences for easy lookup, and will let you simply search for a subsequence to find the one you're looking for. This proposed site keeps track of numbers instead and incorporates more than the pure math that the sequence encyclopedia limits itself to, but it sounds very similar in concept.
The fact that computers are based on numbers is part of the reason it's hard to be good at this, since numbers are used to represent anything and everything. Numbers sometimes aren't really even "amounts" they can be ASCII codes or addresses, so if you give me 58.44 how do I know that's not just ":.," or room #44 on floor #58 (or room #68 on floor #88 from hex). Numbers are meaningless without context. Even the phone numbers that we use every day would be unrecognizable without specific formatting and/or a standard length to give them context.
"Begs the question" is not a synonym for "raises the question".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begs_the_question
http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/ This is huge.
http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Real-Numbers-J-Borwein/dp/0534128408 A Dictionary of Real Numbers (Hardcover)
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
2635622779696759818963956926355997625653382829357706805515232 / 838944787028681613144502774660896402692975681322322888764935
I have lots of better ones. But they'd probably break Slashdot to post them.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This vaguely reminds me of a website years ago that presented an interactive interface of a huge number line. The page was divided into a couple sections for the zoom level, the closest zoom level showed a bar for the number of entries it had for each individual number (tall=more entries). Clicking on the number would give a list of representations, selecting a representation gave a selection from the web resource the info came from.
I checked my bookmarks and googled a bit, but does anyone else remember the site, and if so, is it still around?
Plus ca change, plus c'est les memes choses.