
Why Wikipedia Will Win - jagjit
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2007/12/17/why-wikipedia-will-win.aspx
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aristus
It's amazing how people just don't _get_ what Google is doing, and why. As
with Microsoft, they do lots of things that are failures on their face but
serve secondary purposes.

A free 411 service that is promoted in lots of odd places. Duh, they want to
train a speech-to-text parser, and that's the best way to do it.

Gmail is much better than Yahoo Mail but lags behind, it was invite-only, etc.
But they have a very valuable probe into people's mailing habits. Spam usually
needs a link, so they can better detect and remove spam pages from their
index. And via the invite map, they have a nice graph of connections and
influences between people. I'll bet cash they've used email analysis to gauge
the price of new keywords or even the "buzz" index of startups.

Free website analysis? Free wireless? Free "web accelerators"? Beautiful way
to get the information they need to make their index better. There is no need
to be #1 n any of these things.

The same thing can be said for News, etc.

~~~
robg
"Duh, they want to train a speech-to-text parser, and that's the best way to
do it."

I'm not sure I agree. But what do I know? The problem to me seems to be
individual speakers who can vary so greatly as to make any one prediction,
based on a population-phoneme histogram, very noisy. Speech recognition works
decently now when individuals train their own classifiers. I'm not sure why
products don't coalesce around those specific voice profiles. Here's an
example where, I think, one massive effort to collect many examples is
actually more problematic than helpful. It may work for easily discriminated
phonemes (e.g., one, two, three, four) but the pronounced lexicon is a
minefield of starlust knights. Context helps greatly, but that's much more
data than would be acquired in a 411 call.

We shall see...

