Google Squared

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/what-is-google-squared-it-is-how-google-will-crush-wolfram-alpha-exclusive-video/

by secret • 17 years ago

61 41 17 years ago

snprbob862• 17 years ago

1) This looks awesome. I can't wait to try it!

2) The interviewers are surprisingly immature and unprofessional. They are downright rude to the demonstrator and are clearly ignorant about the amazingly cool technology that they are privileged to be seeing.

skorgu• 17 years ago

They seemed more concerned about user interface decisions and whether it would be launching at IO than the actual technology behind it. I suppose that's a valid angle, it's just not one that appeals to me. And yes, they were quite rude.

huhtenberg2• 17 years ago

I am getting a strong feeling that Google is genuinely concerned about Wolfram Alpha, which makes latter that much more interesting. In the end Google's hyperventilation may create an exact opposite of the effect they are going for.

snprbob862• 17 years ago

I get the strong feeling that this Google vs Alpha silliness is a manifestation of the internet media.

Google is likely carefully studying their competitors continuously and taking prudent actions as necessary. This product doesn't seem like an answer to Alpha as much as it does an interesting 20% project growing up.

huhtenberg2• 17 years ago

I was not referring to the media coverage. I was referring to Google's practice of piggybacking on others' PR efforts - http://www.marksonland.com/2009/04/google_likes_to_steal_oth.... In Wolfram's case they did it twice in rapid succession. That is what's interesting.

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

Quite. This is very different from Alpha (and somethng I've been waiting for from Google for a while). Alpha's not trying to be Google, and this doesn't look like google trying to be Alpha.

You know what Alpha reminds me of most (as a tester - try it out yourself on 5.18)? 'Insert Field' in MS word, where you can insert the date & time, or a reference to a cell in an Excel spreadsheet, or some other piece of external data, and have it automatically update every time the document is loaded. It's sort of like having widgets but being able to call them up with a simplistic natural language interface.

Not all of Earth's <Alpha: world population> people will appreciate this, but it will probably be popular in <Alpha: countries with most universities per capita>. (see?)

alain94040• 17 years ago

What's interesting to watch is the flip by a lot of Google supporters that, one week ago, were saying that unstructure search was just fine - thank you, and this Wolfram stuff had no merit.

Then today they flip and write everywhere that structured is the next big thing.

Ironic, that's all I'm pointing out. I don't know yet which technologie(s) will have an impact (note that it's not an either/or choice, both WA and Squarred can succeed).

paraschopra• 17 years ago

They would have started working on the product months before the world came to know about Alpha

rms3• 17 years ago

Like Google isn't going to buy/license Wolfram Alpha...

dbul6• 17 years ago

You would have thunk Google would have bought loopt, too.

rms3• 17 years ago

They bought a startup in that area a while ago, Dodgeball.

zackattack4• 17 years ago

Why would have Google bought Loopt?

ErrantX3• 17 years ago

Firstly I doubt wolfram would sell (but maybe license). Secondly Google are already facing grumblings about being a monopoly - acquiring or licensing Wolfram could backfire. And thirdly there is probably no need: Wolfram dont bring anything much to the mix (as far as I can tell) except a stack of "expert" curators - which could be hired easy enough :)

aston• 17 years ago

The video demostrates some decidedly non-Googly slowness. If it takes 10+ seconds to load, I don't think very many people are going to be using it...

derefr• 17 years ago

Hypothesizing: it's doing things which require decidedly non-BigTable-like architecture. Most other Google apps in their alpha stages can just take advantage of running on, basically, App Engine; this seems like one of the ones that can't, so it has to run on a separate architecture that hasn't been scaled yet. That would be alright for some other company's demo—if they were anyone else, they'd just use limited, cached, pre-defined data sets. But they're Google, they have the raw data, and they wanted to show off the possibilities of working "from scratch" on anything they like in realtime. Thus, it was similar to an app without any scaling consideration as-of-yet (consider a normal startup webapp) drinking from the entire search index firehose on each query. Ten seconds is impressive.

Once it's deployed across Google's entire cloud it'll speed up nicely.

calambrac3• 17 years ago

Turning the Web into a giant database will crush any attempt to segregate the “best” information into a separate database so that it can be processed and searched more deeply.

This is pure speculation, and I personally doubt its true. First, much of the content of on the web amounts to echoing, filtering, and distorting high-quality source data. If you can tap that source data, are the gains you realize from what's been derived from it worth the extra cost of going out and doing the work to acquire it and then separate out the noise?

Second, there is a lot of real or perceived value in knowing where your data is coming from. Tons of companies pay tons of money to get data and statistics from sources that they can trust. Until Google's willing to vouch for these results beyond "we tried", the bespoke curatorial approach is going to keep capturing these dollars.

robryan• 17 years ago

I think it can rival a structured dataset if it is done correctly. The big advantage that google has, and I know there was a paper they put out about it a couple of months ago, is that they have access to such a large source of data that they can use a great deal of sources to weed out the noise by only using the stuff that appears over many sources.

Then you could also assign sources a reliability rating based on how acurite the information they provide is compared with other reliable sources.

Kind of like a new pagerank but for data integrety.

calambrac3• 17 years ago

Don't get me wrong, I think it's very cool that they're doing this kind of work, and I hope it takes off. What I was really responding to was the idea that this approach would "crush" a more traditionally curated database. At least in the short term, I don't see that happening, because the number of really high-quality data sources is still pretty tractable, because a lot of what's on the web is just going to be echoing/distorting those primary sources anyways, and because trust is such a huge part of that market.

martythemaniak• 17 years ago

Seems Eric has kinda missed the point. From what I've read, Wolfram Alpha is:

- get a bunch of structured, verified, curated data - use mathematica to understand and reason about the data - use NLP to expose mathematica to the web surfer.

What google wants to do is get a bunch of structured data from unstructured data. Great, but competition for Wolfram Alpha? Doesn't look like it right now.

But I guess we'll have a better view of this in a few weeks.

smhinsey• 17 years ago

he didn't miss the point, that is contemporary "journalism." in other words, the story is skewed towards the most controversial possible angle.

it beggars belief that, after dozens of stories on the topic, each with its own universe of commentary, most of which pointing out basically what you've said, that they are unaware that their premise is flawed.

JacobAldridge• 17 years ago

At a first glance, this seems to help take 'Google-fu' to the unwashed masses.

If I ever do a search as generic as 'camera', it's very closely followed by a more detailed search (eg, camera olympus "flash time"). Usually, however, my first search is the most detailed, and I become more vague if I require more results.

As I'm sure most of us are aware, this helps quickly deliver the outcome / answer we seek from searching, but I'm continually surprised at how many people bang a series of vague search phrases into a Search Engine and spend time sorting through the chaff.

Google Squared seems to prompt the sort of thinking I either do before hand, or as an immediate result of seeing 8.6M results. Google-fu enhanced.

(My favourite evidence of this is from Allyn Gibson's blog, which is routinely located by people Googling the phrase "things that happen on my birthday". Think about it, or read #5 on this list http://www.allyngibson.net/?p=1686 )

eggnet• 17 years ago

I wonder when google will publish the energy requirements of a google squared search.

robotrout4• 17 years ago

There are those who say that Google is a parasite that profits off the rest of the internet, displaying copyrighted content of others and managing to sell ads for the privilege. Of course, the people who say these things are quickly slapped down, by folks citing how, without Google, nobody would find those web pages anyway, and Google is doing them a great service.

I have to note that this sort of data scraping shown here, by Google, with no incentive left for anybody to actually travel to the original source web pages, seems to make the first groups case much, much, stronger.

zackattack4• 17 years ago

Can't you de-list yourself from Google? Or add a robots.txt file?

robotrout4• 17 years ago

I suspect that instead of those, there might be more creative solutions.

I'm envisioning consultants, like SEO folks, but these are WDO folks. (Web Data Obfuscation). Web Data Obfuscation is the term I just made up for structuring your web page so Google couldn't scrape it easily. The page would still appear in the google index, as that is a benefit to you, so you would make available enough data to be indexed, but not enough to be usefully scraped.

swombat2• 17 years ago

I'd like to take the opposite side:

I believe that once you publish data (particularly data, but even other kinds of information) on a public, indexed web page, you automatically relinquish control over how it will be used.

That's just reality, and it's also the most profitable way to view online published data, from a global perspective. It is better for all of us if the act of publishing data on the web grants an automatic licence to the downloader to mash it up any way he sees fit. The alternative scenario, where you have to ask for permission for every bit of data, is frightening.

Just because it's "big Google" who is doing the mash-up doesn't make it less ethical than if it was some start-up coming out with a new product (or, say, Wolfram Alpha).

robotrout4• 17 years ago

I would submit that just because it's 'big Google' who is doing the mash-up doesn't make it MORE ethical, either.

Mash-ups are ethical only as long as they provide more money in the pockets of the people you are stealing content from. If they do that, fine. If they aren't, your mash-ups are not ethical, and neither are Google's..

Google Squared

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