4 ms·

10 years ago, the original engineer of Google's search engine told me what he now wanted was asynchronous, human-powered search with curated results, e.g. a Goo

by nobbis 5y ago

10 years ago, the original engineer of Google's search engine told me what he now wanted was asynchronous, human-powered search with curated results, e.g. a Google-like interface, but queries cost $5 and take 15 minutes. Money's no object for him, so he wanted to outsource the filtering, ranking, and interpreting of results. Would be even more useful today (albeit a tiny TAM.)

mroll 5y ago
> the original engineer of Google's search engine you mean Larry Page?
- nobbis 5y ago
  No, the guy who re-wrote Larry's research code into Python and put it in production.
celdon25 5y ago
I would have told him not to quit his day job. That sounds ridiculous.
- nobbis 5y ago
  I don't agree, plus he's a billionaire.
  - leobg 5y ago
    Why’s he not building it now, then? He has the means.
    - nobbis 5y ago
      Building costs more than money.
      - leobg 5y ago
        True. I’m wondering though if he hasn’t given up on the idea. It’s been ten years. Maybe he doesn’t believe anymore that a human could do better, even if given 15 minutes of time? If such a demand exists, should we not be seeing an active “secondary marketplace” for people offering to do 15-minute human meta search & research tasks?
        nobbis 5y ago
        I said "wanted it" not "wanted to build/finance it." Doubt he's given up wanting it. A human can always do better: take Google's results, then remove SEO spam/duplicates, extract more relevant snippets, combine results from multiple nearby queries, etc. Demand exists, but someone has to build it. And it's unclear how big the market is.
jimkri 5y ago
I'm seeing something similar to this when it comes to Lead generation for sales teams. The market right now is full of tools where you search for companies/prospects that you want to target and you end up with a list that is either outdated or incorrect data. One of the solutions is to hire people remotely that will build a list from searching and verifying that the information is correct. There are a ton of scaling issues with a person building the lists, and you will still run into errors, but it has been the best way to verify and have the most up-to-date data. A problem I noticed is people are so use to getting tons of results when they use Google or another database site, so they expect the same with human-powered results. SO I think a lot of expectation setting and also just working with the TAM that understands the impact a curated list will provide over a outdated database. Both have their costs but for a higher impact the human curation will always win over automation. (I have an example of 3 different lead gen sites having a different city for 1 company, the AI on the websites mixed up the location, a Human would be able to catch that)

by nobbis 5y ago

mroll 5y ago

> the original engineer of Google's search engine you mean Larry Page?

nobbis 5y ago
No, the guy who re-wrote Larry's research code into Python and put it in production.

celdon25 5y ago

I would have told him not to quit his day job. That sounds ridiculous.

nobbis 5y ago
I don't agree, plus he's a billionaire.
- leobg 5y ago
  Why’s he not building it now, then? He has the means.
  - nobbis 5y ago
    Building costs more than money.
    - leobg 5y ago
      True. I’m wondering though if he hasn’t given up on the idea. It’s been ten years. Maybe he doesn’t believe anymore that a human could do better, even if given 15 minutes of time? If such a demand exists, should we not be seeing an active “secondary marketplace” for people offering to do 15-minute human meta search & research tasks?
      - nobbis 5y ago
        I said "wanted it" not "wanted to build/finance it." Doubt he's given up wanting it. A human can always do better: take Google's results, then remove SEO spam/duplicates, extract more relevant snippets, combine results from multiple nearby queries, etc. Demand exists, but someone has to build it. And it's unclear how big the market is.

jimkri 5y ago

I'm seeing something similar to this when it comes to Lead generation for sales teams. The market right now is full of tools where you search for companies/prospects that you want to target and you end up with a list that is either outdated or incorrect data. One of the solutions is to hire people remotely that will build a list from searching and verifying that the information is correct. There are a ton of scaling issues with a person building the lists, and you will still run into errors, but it has been the best way to verify and have the most up-to-date data. A problem I noticed is people are so use to getting tons of results when they use Google or another database site, so they expect the same with human-powered results. SO I think a lot of expectation setting and also just working with the TAM that understands the impact a curated list will provide over a outdated database. Both have their costs but for a higher impact the human curation will always win over automation. (I have an example of 3 different lead gen sites having a different city for 1 company, the AI on the websites mixed up the location, a Human would be able to catch that)