back to article Google Knowledge Graph straddles semantic web and Star Trek

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 …

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  1. Dave 126 Silver badge

    >'The search giant's forays outside its core market [search] haven’t gone so well'

    Really? I thought Gmail was fairly popular.

    1. David 164

      An Android control 50% of the mobile market at the moment.

  2. jubtastic1
    Trollface

    A search engine that understands natural language you say?

    Sounds like a good idea, nice fit for a smartphone I'd have thought.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A search engine that understands natural language you say?

      give it another 5 years and Apple will probably try and patent that!

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    limited screen space of smartphones and tablets. please! what is limited screen space in tablets??? my tablet has more pixels than most laptops. it's really annoying that websites still assume I have a small screen estate.

    1. Craigness

      That's not space

      how big is a 60 pixel touch area on a 7" tablet with a laptop-beating "screen space" of 3600*2400px?

    2. Pascal Monett Silver badge
      Thumb Down

      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.

  4. Elcor
    Angel

    Knowledge Graph Introduction

    Though I always knew that Google would eventually become a knowledge engine, my mouth has been open during this video introduction:

    http://www.nublobits.com/?i=watch&s=y&v=mmQl6VGvX-c&n=_GOOGLE_KNOWLEDGE_GRAPH

    1. JPD

      Re: Knowledge Graph Introduction

      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...)

  5. regorama
    FAIL

    Google+ not a success?

    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.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Irresponsible?

      A bit strong isn't it? It's only a an opinion of a social network, not trying to split the atom in your garden shed.

  6. BlueGreen

    "..drill[ing] into unstructured data to make it categorisable and searchable" != the semantic web

    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.

    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: [modeling unstructured data] != the semantic web

      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.

  7. Ammaross Danan
    Facepalm

    Bah, reporters....

    "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."

  8. DRendar

    Give me back my google!

    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

    1. DRendar

      Re: Give me back my google!

      'time', even.

      Posting from a smartphone is a pain in the arse on el-Reg :-/

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      Re: Give me back my google!

      You know you can start blocking crap sites from your google results, right? (I didn't, BTW).

      For now you can use http://www.google.com/reviews/t while waiting for google to reinstate the link to block sites directly in the search results.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    "...they call it the “the semantic web” – which drills into unstructured data to make it categorisable and searchable."

    As opposed to "the Symantec web" - which drills into your computer's data to make it unstable and unusable.

  10. PeteA
    FAIL

    Just search for what I entered

    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!)

    1. FatGerman
      Headmaster

      Re: Just search for what I entered

      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.

      1. Sean Timarco Baggaley

        Re: Just search for what I entered

        "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.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Just search for what I entered

      The irony of your bloviating about simplicity in communication: Your post is so contorted that I can't figure out what the hell you're trying to say.

  11. 27escape
    Facepalm

    alta-vista had this

    Years ago, a nice java applet that would show the relationships between things you found, click on a node and it re-searched and presented again. Very swish.

    Doomed to repeat history, did not expect it to be so soon!

  12. mhenriday
    Pint

    Sounds quite useful to me -

    I'll be very interested in testing it when it's rolled out to those of us who don't happen to use English as our default display language....

    Henri

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