Showing posts with label Web search engine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Web search engine. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Marissa Mayer Doing Search Could Get Interesting

Marissa Mayer
Marissa Mayer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Search is, after all, the fundamental operation on the web. Steve Jobs left the PC to Bill Gates when he returned. But there is no post-Search like there was a post-PC. Search is here to stay. She does not have to become number one. All she has to do is become a strong number two and shine elsewhere. Mayer seems to be saying the Yahoo search results are already pretty good, but search results presentations could be vastly improved.

Marissa Mayer Aims Yahoo’s Guns at Google Search
Yahoo search was one of three parts of the company Mayer called out as in most urgent need of an overhaul, along with Yahoo Mail and the Yahoo.com homepage ..... by far the most lucrative business at Google, where Mayer once headed its search product ..... All of the innovations in search are going to happen at the user interface level moving forward and we need to invest in those features both on the desktop and on mobile .... Yahoo, presumably, can improve its search engine by simply wrapping Microsoft’s search infrastructure in an improved user interface. ..... Yahoo helps power searches on the Siri digital assistant included with Apple iPhones and iPads.
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Sunday, January 06, 2013

Kurzweil Has Found A Home


Singularity: I Am Not Convinced

Singularity is not a concept I have bought into. But anyone who proposes it is a bold thinker. And in attempts at singularity many great things will happen. I want those great things.

Google’s New Director Of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’
World-renowned artificial intelligence expert and Google’s new Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, wants to build a search engine so sophisticated that it could act like a ‘cybernetic friend,’ who knows users better than they know themselves. “I envision in some years that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking,” he said at an intimate gathering at Singularity University’s NASA campus. ..... Language, Kurzweil argues, is the window to creating a genuine artificial brain, that can understand the meaning of ideas and concepts. “If you write a blog post, you’re not just creating a bag of words, you’re creating some meaningful sentences.” For now, search engines have brute-force algorithms that pick out key words in popular pages and hope that the results, on average, will yield the best information. ...... “semantic” search parses the meaning and intentions behind words. Semantic search aims to solve the ‘hotdog’ problem, as explained by Google’s Chairman, Eric Schmidt, “Is it a ‘hot dog’ or a ‘hotdog.’ And, if you knew something about whether the person had dogs, or whether the person was a vegetarian, you’d have a very different potential answer to that question.” ..... Google has access to the “things you read, what you write, in your emails or blog posts, and so on, even your conversations, what you hear, what you say.” .... Google can combine the personalized recommendations of a friend (who often know us better than we know ourselves) with the sum of all human knowledge, creating a sort of super best friend. ....... Kurzweil was quick to dispel the myth he was given “unlimited” funds, but humbly suggests that Google is giving him “sufficient resources for a very important project.”
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