>'The search giant's forays outside its core market [search] haven’t gone so well'
Really? I thought Gmail was fairly popular.
Google’s battle to retain search supremacy is seeing it roll something it claims will take us closer to the "computers of Star Trek". Google has unveiled The Knowledge Graph, which it claims will give you the answers you really want, we presume instead of a bunch of useless blogs, blue links or message fragments from Wikipedia …
Oh, so you have a 24" tablet ? In 1900 x 1200 ? That's cool.
I'd like to know what model it is though, because the biggest current tablets appear to be 10" to 11" (high-end) affaires and the biggest upcoming tablets that are still unannounced (dixit CNet) reach 13".
That data is available here.
My daughter's laptop has a 15" screen in 1200 x 1024 format. We bought it for her two years ago.
There are laptops with 17" screens.
I see absolutely zero tablets with 15" screens, not to mention 17".
Seems to me your laptop must be pretty old.
Not necessarily disagreeing, but that video didn't show anything earthshattering to me - for certain classes of objects they picked attribute sets that seemed relevant, and extended their search to include those attributes
very similar to amaon (and a million other) recommendations engines.
if the attribute tree defines/isolates parameters without human guidance and organizes its structure more dynamically, then this is much more interesting (the part I'm not disagreeing with, since that video didn't make any of that clear, being a million-foot introduction...)
I'm so sick of every media outlet repeating the endless drone of "Google+ is a ghost town!" With over 100 Million users currently, and analytics predicting growth as high as an additional 300 Million users by 2013, making statements about how G+ hasn't been a success is just irresponsible at this point. I check my feed three to four times a day, and have new posts every time. And I don't have to deal with the bugs, unnecessary clutter, endless stream of ads, or seeming hatred for privacy that Facebook harbors anymore.
A good starting definition is that is #not# unstructured, in fact it has some kind of metadata (possibly such as microformats affixed), or has strong structuring in the form or RDF addons, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework> and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web>.
TBH it sounds like you've been had by the google bullshit bears. Ironically enough, even entering "semantic web" in google would have set you right.
Just another case of Gavin swinging the analogy bat and missing, I'm afraid.
I find it hard to get excited about the semantic web (most content on the web doesn't have associated metadata because it's not worth the effort of attaching metadata to it), but yes, if people are going to mention it in their articles, they ought to know what it is.
"The search giant's forays outside its core market haven’t gone so well... It now sounds like the company is trying to recapture the intellectual high ground in an area where it remains strong by doing something it has already tried..."
Why is it that people assume (in their writing at least) that a company can't be multitasking? Your slight is worded as if Google has pulled all their search engine developers and reassigned them to other (singular, at a time) projects at which they consistently fail, and are now reassigning back to search engine improvements. You might as well comment how Windows is/not failing due to XBox success/fail and "Microsoft has lost its focus."
The only thing I want them to introduce is a tickbox that excludes shopping and price comparison sites from my search results.
I am sick to the back teeth of searching for technical information, or reviews of products and getting back 3 solid pages of pricerunner, kelkoo, ciao and other fucking useless middleman websites that waste my time.
www.gmbmg.com used to work quite well, but don't think it's been updated in some tune
Instead of doing word-stemming, "did you mean ... " (no, I didn't, otherwise I'd have typed it) and other annoying "cleverness". Let me enter a predicated condition again [this AND (that OR "the other")]Time after time people try to make computers "intelligent" and fail miserably (Bob, anyone?); leave the intelligence to a human, and just give me a way of expressing my intention without your systems deciding that because there were only three results then I must have meant something different. If there were three results then it was usually because I'd narrowed down the search criteria sufficiently (and occasionally a typo, which was pretty easy to spot!)
And there speaks a geek. The problem with your approach is that you have to talk to the computer in its own language. This simply doesn't work. You know what made Google so popular? It was by providing an interface that normal people could use. They don't have to get to grips with brackets and logic, they just type stuff into it in a way that makes sense to *them*. I remember being amazed by it when after some time of failing to get altavista to find what I wanted by 'narrowing down my search criteria', my mate simply went to Google (which I'd never used before) and typed in, in plain English, the question we wanted the answer to. The answer we needed was the first hit. I've never used another search engine since.
"And there speaks a geek. The problem with your approach is that you have to talk to the computer in its own language."
As opposed to real life when an American or Brit has to talk to a Frenchman in French? It's just another language, and not even a particularly difficult one. Humans—particularly young humans—are very, very good at learning languages.
Computers do not speak English, or any other natural language. Until programmers grok this and realise the problem is that the computer needs to be taught to understand natural languages properly, instead of these half-arsed attempts at "semantic webs" and whatnot, it'll be us humans who'll have to do some of the heavy lifting.
Either program the computer to understand natural language properly, or stop trying to pretend you're doing anything other than papering over the gaping chasms in your user interface's design.
Wolfram Alpha may not be perfect, but it's much better at parsing natural language questions than Google's engine.