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The essay itself is general and surprising, and the combination never loses its effectiveness. Ideas keep evolving. There was nothing new about the idea of a s

The essay itself is general and surprising, and the combination never loses its effectiveness. Ideas keep evolving. There was nothing new about the idea of a search engine when Google came into existence in 1998. In 1945, Dr. Vannevar Bush wrote an article titled As We May Think: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... > he urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. In the 1960’s, Gerard Salton created and developed Salton’s Magic Automatic Retriever of Text (SMART). He also authored a book called A Theory of Indexing detailing his initial tests that search is largely based off of relevancy algorithms. Here’s a very interesting blog post titled Search Down Memory Lane by Tom Evslin who worked with Salton during this project: http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/01/search_down_mem.html http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/01/search_down_mem.html Fast forward to 1990, a man named Alan Emtage created the first search engine known as Archie which retrieved a database files by matching user queries using regexes. Following the growth of Archie’s popularity, two similar search engines Veronica and Jughead were created and they started indexing plain text files. In 1993, the first bot called World Wide Web Wanderer was created and then it was upgraded to capture active URLs and store them in a database. Then came ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing of the Web), which crawled meta information of pages. There’re others including WebCrawler (1994), Lycos(1994), AltaVista(1995), Excite(1995), Yahoo(1995), Dogpile(1996), Ask Jeeves(1996). This is just my superficial understanding of how the idea of search engines was born and has evolved over time. They were very different from Google, but they’ve similarities to how data is processed and analyzed today.

roymurdock 9y ago
What general ideas did we sow in the past 20-30 years that, through minor iterations, are coming to (surprising) fruition today?
- santaclaus 9y ago
  Machine learning
  - tnecniv 9y ago
    Yup You can trace the origins of the ANN to the 40s and 50s. Since then, statistical ML has come into vogue a few times, but not like today. Phones and other data sources (plus the algorithms to properly deal with all the data) have ushered in our current renaissance.
    - bllguo 9y ago
      Huh. Why do you single out phones as a data source? That seems like a weird statement to make. Neural nets are in vogue because everyone has a phone?
      - nly 9y ago
        Machine learning and neural networks are in vogue because it's easier than ever before to collect data for them to be trained upon and process. Phones are a part of that for sure.
      - nostrademons 9y ago
        Everybody has a camera in their pocket that takes pictures for free. That's increased the number of images that you can train a neural network on (and the number of images that you might want to classify with it) dramatically. I remember when I was a kid, you had huge binders of photo albums, and the total number of pictures that a family might own numbered in the hundreds. Now I take that many photos on a week-long vacation, or sometimes just in ordinary life, and my cloud backup has maybe tens of thousands. Multiply that by a billion cell phones and that's a lot of images out there.
        Houshalter 9y ago
        Data was never the issue for neural nets. It was the compute power required to run them. The most popular image recognition dataset today was mostly taken pre-smartphones.
        xapata 9y ago
- contingencies 9y ago
  Free unix. Cryptocurrencies. Military robotics. Personal drones. Augmented reality. Freedom of information. Pervasive media piracy. Darknets. State level hacking. Technofascist dystopia in general.
  - patrickk 9y ago
    Increasingly cheap wind, solar and battery hardware. Smartphones (also enables vastly cheaper batteries and drone components).
flexie 9y ago
- Facebook wasn't the first social network. People were connected, shared pictures, and had friends before. - Amazon wasn't the first online store. - AirBnB wasn't the first short term rental website - Netflix wasn't the first online movie portal. - Apple didn't make the first cell phone or even the first smart phone, or the first music player or the first home computer. - Tesla didn't make the first electric car. - etc. Still, the one criticism that startup hear again and again is that "You are late - it's already there".
- fragmede 9y ago
  There's value in being first to market but what those example really show is that first isn't all it's cracked up to be, and marketing and sales are crucial for success.
  - aflinik 9y ago
    I’d say all of those examples show that you need to be first to the actual market, not just first or first to _some_ market
  - jsonne 9y ago
    First to market is a tactic and potentially an advantage, but it isn't the end all be all of whether or not you'll be successful.
- chubot 9y ago
  Just to play devil's advocate, what was the first online store? I think Amazon was pretty damn close, having started in 1994 as a store that simply stocked a large selection of rare books. The shipping took weeks as I recall. It was not an obvious idea at the time, simply because there weren't that many people on the web. It was around the time that SSL was being developed [1] -- so if you were much earlier you probably couldn't take payments securely. There were probably mail order catalogs that had websites, but I think that is a different thing than a "web store". Also, Netflix wasn't the first online movie portal, but I'm pretty sure they were the first people to make a business out of mailing DVDs! It's crazy that they started like that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_1.0.2C_2.0_and_3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_1...
yread 9y ago
The idea of search engine wasn't new but even today millions of linear algebra students are amazed when they find out how google/page rank works
- johnnyballgame 9y ago
  How does it work?
  - munificent 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank Really neat, simple, iterative algorithm.

roymurdock 9y ago

What general ideas did we sow in the past 20-30 years that, through minor iterations, are coming to (surprising) fruition today?

santaclaus 9y ago
Machine learning
- tnecniv 9y ago
  Yup You can trace the origins of the ANN to the 40s and 50s. Since then, statistical ML has come into vogue a few times, but not like today. Phones and other data sources (plus the algorithms to properly deal with all the data) have ushered in our current renaissance.
  - bllguo 9y ago
    Huh. Why do you single out phones as a data source? That seems like a weird statement to make. Neural nets are in vogue because everyone has a phone?
    - nly 9y ago
      Machine learning and neural networks are in vogue because it's easier than ever before to collect data for them to be trained upon and process. Phones are a part of that for sure.
    - nostrademons 9y ago
      Everybody has a camera in their pocket that takes pictures for free. That's increased the number of images that you can train a neural network on (and the number of images that you might want to classify with it) dramatically. I remember when I was a kid, you had huge binders of photo albums, and the total number of pictures that a family might own numbered in the hundreds. Now I take that many photos on a week-long vacation, or sometimes just in ordinary life, and my cloud backup has maybe tens of thousands. Multiply that by a billion cell phones and that's a lot of images out there.
      - Houshalter 9y ago
        Data was never the issue for neural nets. It was the compute power required to run them. The most popular image recognition dataset today was mostly taken pre-smartphones.
        xapata 9y ago
contingencies 9y ago
Free unix. Cryptocurrencies. Military robotics. Personal drones. Augmented reality. Freedom of information. Pervasive media piracy. Darknets. State level hacking. Technofascist dystopia in general.
- patrickk 9y ago
  Increasingly cheap wind, solar and battery hardware. Smartphones (also enables vastly cheaper batteries and drone components).

flexie 9y ago

- Facebook wasn't the first social network. People were connected, shared pictures, and had friends before. - Amazon wasn't the first online store. - AirBnB wasn't the first short term rental website - Netflix wasn't the first online movie portal. - Apple didn't make the first cell phone or even the first smart phone, or the first music player or the first home computer. - Tesla didn't make the first electric car. - etc. Still, the one criticism that startup hear again and again is that "You are late - it's already there".

fragmede 9y ago
There's value in being first to market but what those example really show is that first isn't all it's cracked up to be, and marketing and sales are crucial for success.
- aflinik 9y ago
  I’d say all of those examples show that you need to be first to the actual market, not just first or first to _some_ market
- jsonne 9y ago
  First to market is a tactic and potentially an advantage, but it isn't the end all be all of whether or not you'll be successful.
chubot 9y ago
Just to play devil's advocate, what was the first online store? I think Amazon was pretty damn close, having started in 1994 as a store that simply stocked a large selection of rare books. The shipping took weeks as I recall. It was not an obvious idea at the time, simply because there weren't that many people on the web. It was around the time that SSL was being developed [1] -- so if you were much earlier you probably couldn't take payments securely. There were probably mail order catalogs that had websites, but I think that is a different thing than a "web store". Also, Netflix wasn't the first online movie portal, but I'm pretty sure they were the first people to make a business out of mailing DVDs! It's crazy that they started like that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_1.0.2C_2.0_and_3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_1...

yread 9y ago

The idea of search engine wasn't new but even today millions of linear algebra students are amazed when they find out how google/page rank works

johnnyballgame 9y ago
How does it work?
- munificent 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank Really neat, simple, iterative algorithm.