Alphabet Google Is Busy Reinventing
July 22, 2016
From Forbes in India (“Sundar Pichai to Reinvent Google with a Heavy Dose of Artificial Intelligence” which may require a proxy maneuver due to the digitally with it Forbes) or Switzerland (“Google’s New Research Lab in Zurich Is Inventing the Future of Search”) — the Alphabet Google thing is trying to reinvent search.
There you go: Stark evidence that Google information retrieval system is deeply flawed. The electric car does not reinvent the car. But search has to reinvent search.
This is a big and probably futile job. My view is that search is an evolutionary beastie. Incremental innovations from research labs, one man band coders, and start ups with one good idea and couple of crazed investors do the job.
Google itself was a roll up of ideas from IBM Almaden (hell, Jon Kleinberg), AltaVista (hello, Jeff Dean, Simon Tong, and Sanjay Ghemawat), and the fumble bumbles of folks at precursors (hello, AskJeeves and Lycos).
The India angle states:
Think of it as Search 3.0—a new, interactive way to communicate with Google itself. With it you’ll be able to order a ticket, book a flight, play music, schedule a task, reply to a message; the Google assistant might even write it for you. It might prompt you to order flowers ahead of Mother’s Day or to pack for your upcoming trip, and it might be able to pick up an earlier conversation from where you left off. In other words, it will be there, ready to help, in your phone, your speakers, your television, your car, your watch and eventually everywhere. “You are trying to go about your day, and in an ambient way, things are there to help you,” Pichai says. Making sure this assistant lives up to its full potential will take years, and building it will be harder than it was for Page and co-founder Sergey Brin to create search itself. Adds Pichai: “In every dimension, it is more ambitious.”
Yep, ambitious.
From the Swiss side:
he new team has a distinct goal: to invent the future of Search, a voice-activated, human-like entity that can answer any query intelligently. “We are building the ultimate assistant. In two years, you can expect Google to become a personal life assistant across multiple surfaces, including your phone, Google Home, even cars,” Mogenet [Google wizard] said. Some of Google’s best-known products are already shaped by machine learning, the ability of computers to spot patterns in large datasets and learn by example. For instance, Google Photos uses it to understand the content of an image. This means you could search for “cardigan corgi” or “passport” or “birthday celebrations 2014” and the app will bring up the relevant photos.
There you go. Reinvent.
The challenge is to find a way to avoid the stagnation which seems to befall certain types of high technology outfits. Do you use your DEC Rainbow today?
I love the Google. It is just super. The problem is that as it has concentrated traffic, it has left itself unable to respond to opportunities such as those identified by Facebook and Amazon. By the way, both of these outfits face some challenges as well.
The investment in search will benefit some folks. But how likely is it that Google will come up with an “innovation” that matters. I think that when octopus companies do something — whether it is good or bad — it is easy to define whatever happens as success.
The problem is that information returned from Google is often off point. When I run queries for documents I have in my hand, I cannot find them without jumping through hoops. I documented this with a Dark Web paper from Denmark in this blog. Homonyms give the Google fits. Even though my search history is available to Mother Google, the system is tone deaf for my queries. When I look for certain information, the data are often disappeared. I noticed that indexing of pastesites, PDF files, and PowerPoint presentations has become laughable.
Innovation is more than a public relations campaign. How do I know? Google’s marketing is starting to remind me of IBM Watson. You know Watson, the revolutionary information access system from Big Blue. Yep, innovation.
Stephen E Arnold, July 22, 2016
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