Google: Pope Pumps Google as HR Tool
March 13, 2009
Step away from the hoo hah about Google’s addition of communication functions to its services. Expected and old news. A more interesting twist in terms of search was the CNN story “Pope: We Should Have Googled Holocaust Bishop” here. The angle for the story was, according to CNN:
The Pope has admitted making mistakes over the lifting of the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop, saying the church will make much greater use of the Internet in the future to help avoid such controversies… “I have been told that consulting the information available on the Internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on.”
Why’s this important? Information in the Google data management systems makes it possible to perform a crude, but useful, type of reputation analysis. Now envision a world in which voice to text, email, and Web content can be queried. The Pope understands that aggregated data is more useful than what one might hear from a single source or two. Why? Data have value when there are numerous points to analyze.
Will traditional Web search systems deliver what’s needed? No. Google has invested in technology that can add two new types of queries to its arsenal of tricks. I don’t know if Google will make these publicly available, but with Google gathering data from multiple input nodes, it is more important to move beyond the simple keyword and concept search. Not even semantics can do the job. Google has invested in queries that deliver a certainty score (how likely a data point is to be accurate) and lineage (where a data point comes from). Add these two much needed types of queries to Google’s arsenal of information and methods and you have human resources research tool that leapfrogs other systems’ capabilities.
The Pope gets it. I wonder how many others can look beyond obvious extensions of Google’s as is technology to the new frontiers. Kudos to the Pope. Not so much praise for the recycling of the Grand Central and other comms functions.
Stephen Arnold, March 12, 2009
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
