Innovation: Not Slowing, Stopped in Search
October 11, 2015
I read “You Call this Progress?” Good article.
The write up points out that some fans of progress may be annoyed at the notion that today’s whiz kids are painting rooms, not building houses. I highlighted this statement:
I think we should admit that our hypothetical 1885 person would be more bewildered by the passage of 65 years than the 1950 “modern” human. I think we should admit that the breathtaking pace of major breakthroughs has actually declined.
I am in agreement with this pace of innovation thing. Years ago when I was working in the thrilling field of big time investing, I remember a discussion among some of my colleagues. The point of the argument was the notion that innovation was ripping right along. I suggested that innovation was more like breeding hamsters than creating a new order of furry friends.
No one at the financial outfit really cared. The focus was making money on things that would create investment opportunities. Do not confuse making money with creating a jet engine.
I can offer one possible market sector which illustrates that innovation has slowed to a crawl in the last 50 years.
Consider search and retrieval. If we look at the early systems, there were things like string matching and counting stuff. There was lemmatization. In fact, most of today’s search and content processing companies are not offering products dramatically different from what was available decades ago.
Sure, today’s products sport graphical interfaces, exploit fast and cheap hardware, and coding methods which allow a stream of content to be moved through an information factory. These are interesting developments, but the underlying procedures are look for strings, alert software or a person when an anomaly occurs, and convert counts for an entity into a graph. Toss in some geo coordinates and ring investors’ door bells.
The problem with search is that humans often have a tough time expressing exactly what they want. That’s why looking at search histories and asking questions like, “What’s the signal for a person’s looking for a pizza joint?” work pretty well.
Also, humans may not know what the heck they want. Armed with partial or incomplete information, the poor human has to look through books from a library or browse a list or colorful icons until something appears meaningful.
I would suggest that once the marketing hoo-hah is stripped from the descriptions of search and retrieval systems, what’s left over reveals the paucity of innovation in information access. Google’s biggest recent search innovation is providing a pointer to content available within an app. Interesting but not discovering penicillin.
Perhaps that’s why it is easier to ask friends or colleagues than use Fancy Dan tools?
Stephen E Arnold, October 11, 2015
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