
Google Squared is an Exponential Improvement in Search - Anon84
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/06/google-squared-is-an-exponenti.html
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neilk
If the exponent is negative, maybe.

But, let's not blame Google for that hype. They haven't claimed this is
anything other than an interesting experiment.

At the moment pretty much all Squares are less useful than a straight web
search. Perhaps that will change as they acquire more data, but I'm skeptical.
As a way of accelerating a human's ability to organize data, maybe it has a
brighter future.

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madcaptenor
Well, according to the name, it's actually a polynomial improvement on old-
fashioned search.

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rarestblog
It's a toy, no more, no less.

According to Google Squared, our Russian President has been dead for a couple
of weeks by now (he's alive and well, just in case you're wondering), we have
been also ruled by someone named "5 November 1996" and "Constitution" was our
President too. The one guy left in the list is not a president at all (Viktor
Chernomyrdin is Russia's embassador to Ukraine).
[http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=presidents+of+russian...](http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=presidents+of+russian+federation)

Exponential improvement, eh?..

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wglb
"exponential" might be an attention-grabbing stretch, but it is clear that we
will discover new uses for this.

I am wondering if anyone knows the relative size of the data behind wolfram
alpha compared to google. I know that wolfram uses "trusted" sources for its
data.

I am recalling a recently quoted paper by Norvig that seems to imply that
having multiple of orders of magnitude of data available changes the knowledge
engine game.

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wallflower
"Wolfram Alpha, the so-called "computational knowledge engine" that launched
this week, claims to have access to a vast repository of information from
trusted sources around the world: 10tn pieces of data filtered through 50,000
models and algorithms."

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/21/1>

> having multiple of orders of magnitude of data available changes the
> knowledge engine game.

Maybe machine learning as well...

"The cloud also makes possible our approach to machine translation in which
thousands of computers process billions of words of monolingual and bilingual
text to build statistical language and translation models."

[http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/05/breaking-
down-l...](http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/05/breaking-down-
language-barrier.html)

~~~
wglb
I had previously missed the part at the end of the article where wolfram does
suggest crowdsourcing as a way to tune, which is what google is all about, in
some sense.

I am also intrigued with "50,000 models and algorithms". What would those be?
Is this just something to impress the journalists?

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stcredzero
Most of those are probably "models."

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wglb
So I am wondering what is meant by a model by them--a row in a table listing
constraints, a relation, a prolog rule?

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TallGuyShort
It's a great way to organize and display search results in certain situations,
but I wouldn't call it an 'exponential improvement in search' just yet.
Getting the actual data (i.e. the search) leaves a lot to be desired. It's the
format itself that I think is a great idea.

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tybris
It's nowhere near useful.

~~~
aidscholar
Agreed - totally underwhelmed by Google Square.

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growt
It's a nice tech demo, but nothing more. I doubt it will ever be usefull,
because that would require real semantic data or real AI (and neither seems to
be around soon).

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foulmouthboy
It's definitely not production ready, but I still hold out hope. Two things
right off the bat to increase its functionality would be to make the columns
sortable and to provide ability to set the column headers equal to a
particular value.

For example, if I run a search on San Diego restaurants to get an idea of
where to go for lunch, I'd like to be able to set cuisine and price and build
from there. I could see other comparisons working similarly.

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robryan
Defiantly not anything useful at the moment, even there example searches
seemed a bit sketchy.

I think it will probably be a company like Google that cracks this problem
just because of the sheer data/ processing power you would need available to
have a good crack at it, we are a fair way off that though.

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Semiapies
It's a neat thing, but wow, this would be over-hype even if it worked much
better.

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GiraffeNecktie
RDFa, we need you now!

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gojomo
My thought, too. The current results are underwhelming, but as page authors
become aware this presentation is possible, some will incrementally make their
markup 'squared'-friendly. Iterate until the results are impressive.

