

Future of Search with Amit Singhal, Google Fellow - tarunmitra
http://lurnq.com/lesson/section/624/where-search-is-heading/

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bambax
There are lots of publicly available data sources that aren't searchable and
should be.

For instance, why can't we search for melodies?

I would love to be able to sing a tune and have a system return a list of
music pieces where that sequence of intervals is found.

It seems pretty possible to do with current technologies \- index side: index
n-grams of intervals from all music pieces produced (the total corpus of
"documents" is probably less than 100 million, not a lot by today's standards)
\- search side: analyze frequencies, convert into n-grams, match those in the
index

So why is it not done?

It would probably be hard for a random startup to do the indexing side (ie,
gain access to the corpus of every song ever produced in digital form), but
for Google or Amazon it would seem to be not that hard...?

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codingblues
'Shazaam' iPhone/Android app does nearly that... it can identify the song by
listening to a part of the actual recorded song. But it still can't identify
the one that you sing or play on an instrument... I am pretty sure they'll be
working on something like this...

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bambax
Shazaam doesn't do what I describe, it just tries to match part of a
performance to the recording of that exact performance.

In my experience, it also doesn't really work.

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hboon
Anecdotally, it works very well for me the last few years. On the other hand,
Gracenote — which Path uses — has been terrible for me.

Does Shazaam not work well for you for a particular genre?

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bambax
To be fair, I didn't test it extensively, but the couple of times I tried it
(on French songs, mainly) it failed.

I also don't fully understand the use case, except maybe if you listen to a
lot of radio in a car?

At home the music that comes out of my speakers is music I already own;
sometimes I listen to radio but even then it's usually faster and more certain
to just go to the station's website to check what music was playing a few
minutes ago, than to be able to launch Shazaam before the song has finished
playing.

Now if I could sing into an app that would be completely different.

~~~
hboon
Ah. I've only tried in on English (language) songs. It's handy if you are out
in a cafe or otherwise, public area and want to identify a song.

Singing into the app would be cool. In my ex-company, there were folks working
on getting it to work for Karaoke. So you can hum a song and it'll figure out
the right track for you to sing with. I don't know if there's a commercialised
product like this.

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lazyjones
I don't want a "smart personal assistant" who is inherently corrupt, i.e.
driven by the desire to sell ads and not to assist me in my best interest.
Hopefully, the future of search will be more decentralized and driven by
individuals' needs.

~~~
koalaman
I think you fail to explain why one precludes the other. (WRGT ads vs a user's
best interest). And I also think that you're overly focused on the
monetization aspect of current search technology. Which neither search in
general nor Google in particular are tightly coupled to. It's simply the best
practical monetization method at the present time.

