
How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google - cmaher
http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/04/29/interview-how-ray-kurzweil-plans-to-revolutionize-search-at-google/
======
rsync
All grand plans indeed ... but a higher priority should be making search even
work at all.

Google search returns approximate results, related results, results with your
words split (or joined) and other nonsense to drive ad views.

Even using the so-called "power tools" like allinsite: and the (barely
functional) quotation marks, you still get very shoddy results.

Anyone who ever searches for very specific groups of terms knows exactly what
I am talking about: enter search terms, click on result, search in page for
term, doesn't exist.

~~~
comex
As annoying as the approximation can be, I'd like a citation for "to drive ad
views". It seems much more likely that it was added for the obvious reason -
to improve search results, on average, for most people, because relevant
results don't always contain the exact search term you put in. In my case, as
many times as it's burned me, there have also been a few where I remember it
presenting exactly the results I wanted, and it's probably done so many more
times without my noticing. YMMV, and it would certainly be nice if Google were
better able to distinguish queries that should not be rewritten from ones that
probably should, but that's no reason to assign nefarious motives.

As has been mentioned, you should probably set your default search to verbatim
mode.

~~~
threeseed
Whatever the reason. It has changed recently and is annoying.

Search for "vertx play framework" and the last two search results don't have
the term vertx despite pages and pages of results with the term. I don't
understand how dropping search terms can make the results more relevant.

Also you can't set the default search to verbatim. You can only hack the query
parameters in specific browsers.

~~~
foobarqux
Add quotes around vertx.

~~~
espeed
This is where I miss the old + sign.

------
dude_abides
Douglas Hofstadter once said of Ray Kurzweil and his grand ideas: _"It's an
intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle
the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid."_

I think Google (and Larry Page) is betting that they will be able to separate
out this mixture.

~~~
ot
The irony is that you could say the exact same thing about Douglas Hofstadter
himself.

~~~
coldtea
Really? I don't think so.

For one, Kurzweill DOES have "grand" ideas. Extravagant visions of a future
with technological immortality, singularity, etc. Hofstadter does not. He
merely examines some things, like cognition, and proposes some theories about
their workings. Like, you know, every scientist.

Kurzweill comes out as grandioze, obsessive and deluded, Hofstadter like a
normal writer, no more or less strange than, say, Marvin Minsky.

~~~
esahione
Except that Hofstadter, other than writing about his ideas and theories, has
accomplished jack shit.

Pragmatically speaking, Kurzweil is miles ahead of Hofstadter in terms of
putting his theories and ideas to practice.

It's very easy to criticize visionaries, until they achieve something. Then
nobody holds the critics accountable for their negative attitudes towards the
visions, and the critics probably would claim that the progress was obvious
(in hindsight everything is obvious).

~~~
coldtea
> _Except that Hofstadter, other than writing about his ideas and theories,
> has accomplished jack shit._

Why would he have to accomplish anything else? He is not an inventor, he is a
writer.

> _Pragmatically speaking, Kurzweil is miles ahead of Hofstadter in terms of
> putting his theories and ideas to practice._

I don't think so. He merely invented some low hanging fruit in early computer
science, like OCR and text recognition. Things on which other people worked
and had results too.

And things that, even now, 3 and 4 decades after his inventions, are miles
BEHIND of his expectations of them, and somewhat of a disappointment still.

> _It's very easy to criticize visionaries, until they achieve something._

And it's equally easy to be a "visionary", if you don't have to also achieve
those visions. Visionaries are a dime a dozen, especially in California.

~~~
hdxuyx
>>I don't think so. He merely invented some low hanging fruit in early
computer science, like OCR and text recognition. Things on which other people
worked and had results too.

It only looks like low hanging fruit after it is done.

>>And it's equally easy to be a "visionary", if you don't have to also achieve
those visions. Visionaries are a dime a dozen, especially in California.

What exactly is your overall point? Most visionaries will fail because that is
just how things are. Leonardo da vinci was a great visionary that could not
fulfill any of his visions. Visions that were fulfilled hundreds of years
latter. Eventually somebody will fulfilled those visions. Again, I don't
understand what you are bitching about.

All this irrational hate against the guy for daring to dream what would be one
of the greatest achievements of human history is unnerving. Eventually we WILL
have strong AI, we are living proof that it is possible just as birds were
living proof that things could fly.

------
gavinh
I'm working on some open source projects that pertain to recognizing
entailment in plain text. Entailment is the relation that holds when one text
"follows from" another.

For example, "Carolina beat Duke" follows from "Carolina defeated the Duke
Blue Devils once again". I have a demo here:
<http://ec2-23-22-22-135.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8001/demo>

Here's an example app that uses entailment recognition to answer natural
language polar (yes or no) questions: gavinmh.github.io/HelloTablet.

I'd be happy to talk to anyone who is interested in getting involved.

~~~
fchollet
I like your demo. Do you have references to papers that you used as a basis
for your code?

~~~
gavinh
Thanks. It is based on <http://nlp.stanford.edu/~wcmac/papers/nli-diss.pdf>.

I use a simpler alignment representation, and use semantic role types in the
predictions.

------
coldtea
> _How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google_

By rigorous hand-waving, as he mostly does things the last 1-2 decades?

~~~
J_
Haters gonna hate. Larry Page obviously didn't hire him and let him take up
Google's resources for his "rigorous hand-waving".

How does this one-liner contribute to the conversation at all? Your negativity
is unenlightening and obnoxious.

~~~
coldtea
> _Haters gonna hate. Larry Page obviously didn't hire him and let him take up
> Google's resources for his "rigorous hand-waving"._

No, he did it to get some PR of Google as a mad-genius storage. He also did it
with tons of other semi-retired Comp Sci legends. He might also like the guy,
or believe the Singularity mambo-jambo himself.

There's a line going around about Google being where "old computer scientists
go to retire".

> _How does this one-liner contribute to the conversation at all?_

By giving a summary of the whole thing? A very succinct one at that? If it's
also accurate (which you can argue about), then it's a perfect contribution to
the conversation.

~~~
J_
It's still a shitty thing to say. Why do you think he's set to accomplish
nothing but get PR for Google? Because he's old?

The guy isn't an idiot, and has managed technical teams his entire life.

------
sixQuarks
Is it just me, or does Ray Kurzweil seem to be getting younger? I remember
seeing a speech of his a few years ago, he had a nervous tick where he was
blinking his eyes constantly. He also looked a lot older. Now, he doesn't have
that tick, seems to have more hair, etc.

I know he takes like 100 pills every day

~~~
coldtea
People can look older and younger at different times, depending on weight gain
or loss, stress or depression, choice of clothing, plastic surgery (duh!),
more or less workout, etc.

Him getting 100 pills every day: I don't think is very relevant. Mostly
delusional. If that worked, pharmaceutical companies would have made it into
one mega-pill, and sold it for a fortune to rich people years ago.

~~~
eavc
Something as simple as lighting could also play into it depending on what
opportunities you have for seeing someone at different times.

As for your argument against 100 pills, that only holds if it's well-known or
well-established that it works and works safely.

~~~
coldtea
> _As for your argument against 100 pills, that only holds if it's well-known
> or well-established that it works and works safely._

Or semi-safely. The rich are also "early adopters". Also see tragically failed
plastic surgeries and BS like cryogenics.

But still, that it's not "well-established that it works and works safely", is
exactly my point about his use of the pills. Mostly wishful-thinking on his
part.

------
obviouslygreen
Call me paranoid, but this has to be the mashup best suited to produce Skynet.

~~~
pavedwalden
Yes, but they'll need Boston Dynamics in the mix before they can build
terminators.

------
goloxc
while Wolfram said that the bottom-up approach is the new kind of science

~~~
taliesinb
Wolfram and Kurzweil are betting on opposite horses here. I work for Wolfram,
but I'd be delighted if the ML-approach works. Personally, I think we need a
diversity of approaches to really understand how to crack the nut of 'hard AI'
(if that is even a sensible thing to pursue).

------
ippisl
I wonder what would be the best strategy for google to monetize such an asset
as ibm watson? Surely ads based model is not the best way(since they've
already got a large part of the internet ad market and given that only google,
ibm and maybe microsoft could build something similar.

If it's a truly competitive advantage, wouldn't offering it for
startups/other-businesses in return for equity would offer bigger profits?

~~~
alok-g
My best understanding is that Watson would be too costly as compared to
Google.

~~~
ippisl
They say now it's "a pizza-box-sized server".

~~~
alok-g
Thanks. I could find some references using those keywords!

Do you then also know about the cost per query as compared to a Google search?
Or alternatively, how much concurrent traffic can they handle with that
server?

~~~
ippisl
I don't know, but i don't think that really matters. google mostly deals the
"cheap" stuff, while watson deals with really valuable stuff , so compute cost
is is not so important.

I think there was a query on quora about this.

------
jpalomaki
I think Google Books project provides an interesting twist on this. Now their
AI not only has the whole content of the publicly accessible Internet to study
but also quite nice chunk of material ever put on paper.

------
youngerdryas
>Kurzweil eventually wants to help create a “cybernetic friend” that knows
what you want before you do

I am not sure I want that. At least not as much as Google does. Kurzweil is
going to help me click on more ads. Shreds any sense of him being a visionary.

~~~
jaxytee
I'm 100% sure I don't want this. Exploration and discovery as a whole is one
of the most rewarding experiences we have as humans. I don't want that
outsourced to some machine/ algorithm. I addition to that, we deal with so
much cognitive dissonance within our brains on a day to day, minute to minute,
millisecond to millisecond basis, I'm not convinced Google (even with their
massive cache of data on us) could even predict what we "want" anyhow. Think
of youtube and it's "recommended for you" video suggestion. Just because I
listen to Lil Boosie every now and then dosen't mean I want to hear all the
shitty southern rap songs it's choosing for me.

~~~
dpatrick86
I'm not in love with the personally tailored search experience as it stands.

I'm totally OK with searching "#{my_city} taxi" instead of "taxi" if it means
when I search "abortion" I get a sampling of search results that has the
greatest co-citation... instead of something that myopically focuses on
Google's perception of my preferences.

At the least, I'd like to be able to switch off the personalization. But
anyway... Beating a dead horse here in this community, I'm sure.

~~~
fyi80
If only there were a way to predict that users searching for "taxi" tend to
want local results, and users searching for "abortion" don't. You know, like
that other search engine does, called, um, Google:

<https://www.google.com/search?q=abortion>

<https://www.google.com/search?q=taxi>

Or if you were willing to type more than 2 words into the search box before
blaming Google for failing to read your mind, while you simultaneously tell
Google to stop trying to read your mind.

~~~
ryankey721
I believe he's trying to say that he doesn't want results tailored to him at
all. For example, if I were republican, I'd tend to get anti-abortion material
when searching.

He seems to be saying that he'd be okay with typing in his city name to get
local results in exchange for not having any personalization. In other words,
it's beyond local vs non-local.

------
michaelochurch
Every time I read about machine learning work that is being done at Google,
that's available if you're a Real Googler, and then compare that to the
closed-allocation nightmare the other 90% face, it makes me want to fucking
rage out and fly a plane into Mountain View...

... land, get off that plane, take a cab, and have a polite but blunt
conversation with the founders about how to fix their company. (What did you
think I meant?)

Artificial intelligence is nice, brahs, but natural stupidity in the form of
closed allocation and Enron-style performance reviews are putting that company
at 10% speed. Clear out the latter and you'll have plenty more muscle for the
former.

I'm sure Ray Kurzweil will do amazing things, but he'd do even _more_ amazing
things if the company still had the machinery (e.g. open allocation, a culture
of human decency) to bring talent to him properly. The whole reason he is
there is to work with great people that the company is supposed to be better
equipped to find than he is... but how will that work, given that the company
sold off its ability to reward and recognize talent just to appease McKinsey?

~~~
nostrademons
I'm a little curious - have you done machine learning work that's made it into
a real product?

I tried doing it a bit with my last project. My results were basically
terrible. It turns out that getting useful results out of heterogenous, vague,
fuzzily-specified real world data is really hard.

I'm tight with a few folks in Search Quality whose job _is_ that sort of data-
scientist machine-learning work, and they're really good at it. Y'know what
90% of their daily time is spent on? Compiling golden sets. Labeling training
data. Running MapReduces to collect basic statistics about their data set.
Running MapReduces to identify representative members of their data set, and
outliers that should be excluded. Shoving data into R to visualize it. Futzing
with numeric coefficients. Building webpages and tools so they can visualize
the data and results, futz with the numbers online, and get feedback in real
time. Collecting test sets and running your algorithm against them, and then
trying to figure out why your losses are losing.

Machine-learning from a practitioner's POV is not at all like the textbooks
and theoretical papers suggest. I'd estimate that less than 10% of one's time
goes into the "fun" part of machine learning - brainstorming new signals and
writing the code to extract them and feed them into your classifier - and 90%
is on the kind of grunt work that hard science grad students do all the time.
You get paid well for it, but that's because a lot of the work is _really_
boring and time-consuming. I suspect that I get a far more frequent rush of
accomplishment as a mostly-UI guy than the data scientists in my department
get.

It's a tool. It works well in some cases, but it can take a lot of effort to
get it to work well.

~~~
michaelochurch
I can only speak for myself here, but I find a lot of what you described as
"grunt work" to be fun. Yes, it's true that when you work with real world
data, you don't only work on the mathematical modeling, and you spend a lot of
time just setting yourself up to be able to do what is typically called the
"fun" part. For me, personally, I find all of the work involved to be fun--
even setting up a data pipeline and figuring out how to distribute a
computation. Automating away grunt work and setup process is fun, too.

Part of what makes data science fun is the machine learning itself. And an
equally interesting part of it is is that it involves so many other parts of
computer science that a typical corporate job would call "too hard" and
isolate you from.

At least based on what I've seen, data scientists are _respected_ and this
means they get dibs on the most interesting projects. However, the interesting
projects themselves involve a lot of detailed work (that's the nature of
technology) and if you're _that_ interested, you're going to want to do it
yourself, at least until you really understand the problem (at which point,
you'll automate the dull stuff).

------
kashrr
Kurzweil has grand ideas, thinks out of the box enough for people to call him
crazy. I would guess some of those are the kind of grand / crazy ideas larry
and company want to pursue too. So i think it is a good fit. For more
information on the man and what motivates him. See the documentary the
Transcendent Man, <http://www.amazon.com/Transcendent-Man/dp/B0051Y6NQA>

