Slashdot Mirror
Google Buys AI Social Search Service Aardvark
eldavojohn writes "MIT's Tech Review is covering an acquisition it finds very interesting. Google (which recently announced Buzz) has acquired Aardvark. The review covered Aardvark and the artificial intelligence it uses in its searches in 2009."
Interesting name for a social service. An animal with a long nose that sticks it in crevices and laps up insects. How metaphorical.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I think they realize that, and it appears that Wave is an important part of fixing it. Gmail and Buzz I use in a single window- my Buzzes run inside Gmail pretty seamlessly in a single window. And it appears to me that Buzz is really a wave app.
I also thought that when I first looked at Buzz.... but then I realised that Buzz is actually working off a rather minimalist integration of different websites model. This is actually a good thing - so instead of Facebook's model of providing "albums" and "notes", etc, I can publish a "newsfeed" that features the pictures I upload to flickr, the videos I put on youtube, the blog items I post on blogger, etc. Done right this is much much more powerful than Facebook - and part of "done right" will have to be integrating good ways of finding people - both by attributes such as name and location, and also by "group" - organisational or interest-based affiliation.
Most complex software uses some concepts taken from machine learning.
AI this AI that. Die in a fire. AI is a buzzword on par with announcing your application uses red-black trees. YAY. Nobody cares unless there's a performance problem and a particular implementation is under scrutiny.
When I see "AI" in the subject of a slashdot thread, I expect it to have some connection to Artificial General Intelligence, rather than something anyone can code after reading Norvig or Duda & Hart.
If you RTFA, this has almost nothing to do with real artificial intelligence, it's just some basic text pattern recognition that directs your question to a person who claims some knowledge of the field. Basically all they have done is put a filter in front of Google Answers. That still may be a good thing for Google, but calling it AI is absurd.
Vark is the Afrikaans word (probably Dutch as well) for pig.
Makes sense, Google is becoming way too corpulent. Hey, I just realised corporate rhymes with corpulent.
Fat and greedy.
Living in NYC, the vast majority of questions I get asked on Aardvark consist of "Where's a good place to go drinking?" and the like. I don't think verification is necessarily called for.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Maybe they're planning on buying everything and this was the first listing in their phone book...
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!