Squared Omits Dimensions of a Google Data Push
January 24, 2010
Short honk: The Googlers have taken a break from international geopolitical activities and taken another baby step toward semantic nirvana. I won’t provide you with the full back-story of the programmable search engine, which I wrote up a three years ago for BearStearns and also explicated in Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator. I added to the depth of the technical discussion with a white paper I coauthored with Sue Feldman of IDC in Report #213562 and revealed more of the technical details of the broader semantic and data management innovations in Google: The Digital Gutenberg. You will have to purchase these studies because this Web log is a marketing vehicle so I can feed by dogs and the goslings.
I wish to point out that the name “squared” does not do justice to the capabilities that the expanded service revealed in “Understanding the Web to Make Search More Relevant.” On the surface, the Google Squared services looks a lot like WolframAlpha. Appearances can be deceiving. WolframAlpha is quite interesting because it is coded on the Mathematica framework and combines content parsing to answer questions. The Google approach is a deeper one that hooks together a large number of Google components into a “smart semantic system”. This construct consists of some fascinating moving parts and culminates with outputs that appear to reach well beyond “answering questions” and “generating result tables.”
If you have some time, you will find the patent documents filed by Ramanathan Guha in February 2007 quite helpful. These can be supplemented with the patent document US20070198481, Automatic Object Reference Identification and Linking in a Browseable Fact Repository.” The Google announcement connects two dots with a faint dotted line: a snippet implementation and the deeper data management functions in Squared.
Keep in mind that a “square” is one type of function, one that is quite familiar. The n-cube approach is more robust, more difficult to visualize, and exactly where Google seems to be headed—content assembly. What happens when the dots are connected? Good question and one I try to answer in my Google monographs.
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2010
Despite the flurry of posts from Googlers to this blog’s comment section, no one is paying me to call attention to my studies, Google patent documents, or the notions of multi-dimensional approaches to query resolution. Alas! I will report this to the chaps at NIST and the NSF who have an interest in such esoteric methods.
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2 Responses to “Squared Omits Dimensions of a Google Data Push”
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Hey Stephen,
So this http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html was the first input tool rolled out for the PS, or would you say that Knol also falls into this category?
Thanks,
Frank
PSE not PS. FB