Google: Another Angle on Question Answering
July 5, 2008
On July 3, 2008, the USPTO published US20080160490. Applications do not equal real products and services. Many people remind me that patent applications are the busy work of misguided engineers, flights of fancy, or bar bets among engineers to see who can fool the USPTO. The application was filed on March 22, 2007, and published about 15 months later, pretty snappy for this fine US government entity. The paperwork was herded along by Google’s legal eagles at Fish & Richardson, a law firm operating from the warm and sunny Minneapolis, Minnesota.
If you are curious, you may want to take a look at “Seeking Answers to Questions”. The buzz about Powerset’s marvelous semantic search engine has many folks twittering. You may want to visit Hakia.com here to see an all-software approach. Then check out Yahoo’s help system here which seems to share some similarities with what Google describes. You can find other question answering systems, including InQuira’s implementation for Honda, Semantra’s system, et al.
Here’s what Google says its invention does:
A computer-implemented method of seeking answers to questions comprises receiving one or more questions from users seeking answers, maintaining an inventory of pending questions to be answered, and transmitting a question from the pending question inventory to a network location determined to be topically relevant to the transmitted question based on the content of the network location.
Pretty mundane, right? If so, then why are two Google wizards–Udi Manber and Benedict Gomes–wasting their time and Google’s money with this approach to question answering?
The social aspects of this invention are interesting. The human inputs hook into the Google infrastructure. There are hints of Google’s method for figuring out what’s good and what’s less good expressed as “knowledgeable users”, Google’s desire to build knowledge bases as it does with phonemes, and Google’s interest in hooking traffic into Web sites for the purpose of selling advertising. The notion of experts collaborating with experts struck me as a broader implementation of the types of operations one can achieve with appropriate resources via Tacit Software’s system for an enterprise.
This invention caught my attention because it expresses the meta-nature of some of Google’s other recent innovations. Google is chugging to knit existing intelligent sub systems into integrated fabrics of functionality.
I find this invention amusing because as Microsoft pursues Google with Xerox PARC technology that iterates down to meaning via machine processes. Google is exploring how to integrate human smarts, Google fancy math, and finer-grained advertising opportunities for advertisers. Judge for yourself if this expresses a holistic approach to information. The patent application is only 13 pages of crystal clear Google legalese and engineering explication. Agree? Disagree? Let me know.
Stephen Arnold, July 5, 2008
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