
Siri, Quora, And The Future Of Search - davidedicillo
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/16/siriquora-and-the-future-of-search/
======
Kylekramer
The problem with the idea of "an internet on which the best answers to the
majority of our queries come not from the vast, increasingly noisy expanses of
the world-wide-web but from the concentrated knowledge and experience of its
most articulate experts" doesn't exist on any sort of large scale. A site that
gets you in conversation with intelligent insiders and hooks them in with
upvotes used to be called Reddit. We see what happens to that on a large scale
(which, in Quora's case, doesn't even seem to be in the cards).

Google and Wikipedia work because they don't limit who has a voice (initially,
of course). They gather every contribution, and then make a decision. That way
they can be both more comprehensive and often better sources of information
than some guy who has a bit of cachet in a community.

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Androsynth
Quora has the worst karma-whorage of any site out there and its more about who
answers the questions rather than what they say. This has killed its
credibility in my mind. (Contrast this with Stack Overflow, which is about
high quality answers and doesn't seem to suffer from whoring for karma)

~~~
gojomo
I agree there's something to your observation. And yet, Quora doesn't show
karma totals or leaderboards, while SO does.

How does Quora get more distracting status/attitude-competition when answers
are only ranked against each other in the context of a single question – a
tiny subset of the gamesmanship-encouragement that SO implements?

Is it the greater subjectivity of Quora's topics? The vague pretentiousness of
its seed community? Or something else?

~~~
demione
IMO it has to do with the fact that Quora forces you to state your real name
and credentials when creating an account. Although certain people will feel
this is the way to ensure answers are given by the best possible authority on
a subject, it actually hinders the meritocracy of user-driven content.
Uneducated but well-informed Quora users may feel it's not worth their time to
contribute, because they'll just be overshadowed by someone with better
credentials. In essence, it's like paying for a game's DLC instead of putting
in the time to earn it on your own, cheapening the experience for all.

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samirahmed
Siri disappoints me.

It is limited to the 10 styles of commands and it from what I have read it
cant interpret different grammatical forms of similar search contexts.

I have written software that can do the barebones of what Siri can do
(www.samir-ahmed.com/iris.html). It is far less efficient flexible and
polished. But I have 6 months of software experience and Siri has 8 years of
DARPA quality experience.

I dont think that google is going to suffer to much unless

A - Siri can integrate well with other apps so that app developers can
contribute to its grammar and its ability to interface with twitter,
foursquare, facebook, open table etc. This is open the floodgates for Siri to
basically be the ultimate iPhone utility, allowing people to use it to
interface with their entire phone in a new way

B - Siri starts to get smarter - and I mean creepy smart. When your wife sends
you an email, Siri needs to read it. Understand what your wife is like, and
store that information. It needs to do this with every contact so that it has
context. This will require an immense amount of machine learning and natural
language processing. What this will do however, is open the doors for a
variety of new applications.

You can data mine with Siri E.g -"What did my wife ask me to pick up from the
supermarket"

When you query your contacts, it can make smart recommendations E.g -"Remind
me to buy my wife a present" Siri can look into your correspondence and make
recommendations.

Being able to do all these things will make Siri an order of magnitude more
useful, open to door to advertising revenue too and kick Google in the balls.

Until Siri can do these things, Siri is will not be the future of search.

~~~
mediaman
Samir, I read through your site and the sample video and it looks quite
impressive. Put a good-looking front-end to it and I don't know how anyone
would differentiate it from Siri, except for some differences in what API
'verbs' the system is capable (Siri knows how to manage my calendar, but Iris
knows how to get content from YouTube, for example). Iris even knows how to
concisely get some info that Siri doesn't perform well with; for example, it
gives a concise summary in response to a question about who a particular
soccer player is, whereas Siri would probably just punt me to the web or at
best pull up a long WolframAlpha response.

Anyone know why Siri seems only as capable (and in some respects less so) than
this 4 week project done by a junior in college? Or (besides the UI work) is
there something majorly different?

My understanding is that the speech recognition isn't special with Siri, Apple
just licensed tech from Nuance, known for their Dragon Dictation product line.

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gojomo
If TC had any reliable source on a $1 billion Google offer for Quora, wouldn't
that morsel have gotten it's own story, rather than being trickled out
indirectly in a guest post?

Someone – maybe someone who'd like to make it true via self-fulfilling
premature reporting – has been pushing the ill-sourced 'gossip' of such an
offer since Quora's last funding round. Nicholas Carlson gave the gossip a
more sober treatment back in February:

[http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-02-22/tech/30094132...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-02-22/tech/30094132_1_quora-
answers-com-adam-d-angelo)

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shriphani
" most sophisticated piece of AI to ever to see the light of the consumer
market"

Huh ? So no other consumer-facing product's AI can match a smart STT? Google
Search, Kinect, handwriting recognition.. nothing ?

~~~
drats
Just watch this video[1] of Siri asking for the user to choose Home or Work
and then after the user, who has a heavily accented English, says "work" twice
it offers up "walk" and "wall". There are only two possible answers, both his
replies start with a "w", the first ends with a "k", and this "most
sophisticate piece of AI to ever see the light of the consumer market" can't
figure out he probably means work?

Edit: I work with, and know personally, a lot of geeks, hackers and
researchers. I don't know anyone who uses Quora or thinks it's the key to
anything.

[1]<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiU8GPlsZqE>

~~~
davidedicillo
"I work with, and know personally, a lot of geeks, hackers and researchers. I
don't know anyone who uses Quora or thinks it's the key to anything."

What about Stack Overflow?

~~~
drats
I know it's not popular on Hacker News, but actually AI research has little to
do with Lisp/the language of the moment or the Q&A website of the moment. It's
to do with algorithms and core datasets. Watson being one example that's not
just based on shuffling around email and setting alarms on your phone.[1]
Andrew Ng's work at Stanford is another example of something that's feeding
into really changing the world, not the HN stereotype of two ivy grads doing a
ruby on rails app which gets an edge in a market dominated by a few lumbering
megacorporations. Not that both aren't important, but there is a heavy bias on
HN toward the latter, and new languages, rather than core research and
algorithms.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)>

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zerostar07
I "love" those articles sticking "Quora" next to every major tech buzzword.
Yet quora is not relevant for me anymore. Are you guys still on quora?

~~~
rudiger
This is just typical Techcrunch kingmaking, no different than any other
popular news source leveraging its position of influence.

~~~
fredwilson
Based on third party traffic measurement services, it appears that quora is
roughly the same size as hacker news

~~~
rudiger
What is the relevance of the traffic numbers?

(Not trolling, I'm just wondering what I'm missing.)

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peterzakin
This is interesting, but I'm not sure if it's really saying anything more
than: Quora, as a knowledge-store, can power mobile search. I say mobile
search, since that seems to be the implication of his dream of a siri-quora
collaboration.

But is knowledge extraction from Quora really so game-changing with respect to
the mobile web? Don't get me wrong--I love Quora and I think it's an
incredible knowledge resource online.

But I think the power of siri comes from real-time knowledge (that is,
knowledge or information that is useful to us while we're on the go). My
experience on Quora has been so much more about intelligent, high-quality
content than about real-time, practical, in-the-moment information.

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bermanoid
The "future of search" is very intimately related to the "future of AI", and
quite frankly, Quora has nothing to do with either, except that maybe it will
be a decent source of answers to specific questions about startups...

As for the future of search and AI, the way I see things, there are eventually
going to be two main AI camps that emerge (NB, I'm not saying that this is the
state of the AI field right now, but I think it will segregate more along
these lines in the next few years):

1) Big data AI: this is the Google style of AI, which usually assumes that the
best way to do AI tasks is to use fairly naive algorithms and toss truckloads
of data at them.

2) Deep model AI: this group is more about models, and believes that the best
approach is to extract as much structure as possible from a limited data set.
More data helps, to be sure, but the emphasis is more on getting as much as
possible out of the data rather than getting more data.

The way things are going now, Google is going to win at big-data AI, no ifs,
ands, or buts - they've got more data than just about anyone. So the way I see
it, the only way someone is actually going to unseat Google is if it turns out
that deep-model is a workable approach (thus far it hasn't had many serious
successes), and Google doesn't focus on it early enough (because if they _do_
, then their massive data availability will make sure they win anyways - that
said, the folks like Peter Norvig driving the attention at Google are very
explicitly in favor of data-based approaches, so I don't see Google leading
the pack on model-centric research).

IMO there are some good reasons to think that deep-model approaches are
viable: despite Google's massive billion-book data sets, humans are still
better at doing, for instance, translation, despite the fact that a good
translator might have only received the equivalent of maybe .1% of the input
that Google leans on for its translation approach. The question is, will
anyone actually figure out how to do it well? That's up in the air, but the
fact that evolution figured out how to do it means that it's probably not
terribly difficult, we just haven't looked in the right places yet.

My personal opinion is that the main pinch point in the typical big-data
approach is that it's limited by statistical correctness, whereas human
intelligence is not (we happily assume patterns exist in data even when we
don't have enough data to make a proper statistical inference, and then we
filter out incorrect assumptions later, also by using statistically incorrect
heuristics and patterns - in other words, we're usually wrong, but sometimes
we get lucky, and as long as we can eventually recognize that we're wrong, we
do just fine). I think deep-model hopefuls would be wise to look more
seriously at explicitly statistically unsound approaches if they want a shot
at beating out big-data...

~~~
ZephyrP
Deep model is progressing much more rapidly than the statistical card-trick
algorithms, Boltzmann machines, and in specific Restricted Boltzmann machines
already vastly outperform SVM (By which I mean to say both Structured and
Support vector machines) in a number of hidden model discovery tasks related
to CV and is taking a lot of the existing 'state of the art' backprop
classifiers (classical Neural Net & k-means clustering) to town.

That said, traditional stochastic & markov driven approaches are more familiar
and are cheaper to implement, which has hitherto driven the development of
virtually all sciences.

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foobarbazetc
Quora still exists?

