3 ms·

As for natural language interfaces, you can, right now, go to Google and type in "two-bedroom homes in Paradise, California". It won't try to answer it. It wi

As for natural language interfaces, you can, right now, go to Google and type in "two-bedroom homes in Paradise, California". It won't try to answer it. It will instead send you to a site that is a database, right? And as I mentioned, numbers from Google's homepage are declining specifically because people are skipping that step. The web as a general-purpose database is a vision that has yet to materialize. Yes, sure. I guess that's my point: its materialization will be the basis of the next cycle. I have concrete grounds to believe that it's on its way and it will be tremendously exciting because it's the beginning of the final form. The data will get more complex, more contextual, and more refined, but it will always be data. The astonishing thing about new paradigms is that it's like suddenly being able to see; entire new dimensions open up; things that we didn't even consider before become suddenly cake.

BjoernKW 10y ago
> numbers from Google's homepage are declining specifically because people are skipping that step. That's only if people know already which database to query. Moreover, to some extent, Google's already trying to provide a direct answer to user queries (flights, directions, queries for which a Wikipeda / Wiktionary abstract is the best hit). Doing a "SELECT * FROM restaurants ORDER BY review DESC" is simple, discovering the database to execute that query against is still difficult. We'd need some sort of service discovery to automate that beyond making machines understand natural language.