8 ms·

17 Year Old Builds a Better Search Engine

165 points by adebelov 14y ago

saalweachter 14y ago
It's not really appropriate to this particular story -- high school student vs VC-funded startup -- but what really bugs me about all "the next Google" reporting is that they ignore the biggest gotcha of search: corpus size matters. The secret sauce of a successful search engine isn't the core algorithm which handles 90% of the work 90% of the time, it's the millions of tweaks which keep the millions of pathological cases from making every query useless. On a small enough corpora, even grep does a great job. But once you are trying to search the world, it stops being an insight problem; at scale there are so many corner cases that you can't ignore them.
koide 14y ago
I was instantly reminded of David Evans (from UVA and Udacity fame: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/ http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/) listening to this kid, both physically and in his manner of speech. I really expect to... eeeh... see more of him in the future.
enjo 14y ago
A much better explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmxNuVDJZEY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmxNuVDJZEY
- sosuke 14y ago
  One of those ideas that, after you hear it, you think ya, that makes total sense, why isn't this already being done? Very cool project idea to be working on still in high school. Edit: This is 2011? Anyone know if something usable came out of this? http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science-fair-gold-medalist-17-invents-better-way-to-search-internet/article600329/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science-fair-gold-...
  - ehsanu1 14y ago
    Who says it isn't already being done? I'm pretty damn sure Google and Bing do some sort of topic modeling (LDA, LSA or something else) that basically does the same thing - though the exact method is not the same. Watching the TED talk, he seemed to be comparing his search results to that of some academic search engine, which are generally very dumb and purely keyword based. Google does a whole lot more than that. Kudos to the guy for figuring this all out on his own, but I don't think this research is as original as portrayed by the media here.
  - anothermachine 14y ago
    It's not novel work. It's an toy implementation of standard technology. It's impressive for a young person to understand and synthesize the components, but it's an engineering practice project, not an innovation.
naner 14y ago
...for the social-media world His search is focused on short text blurbs from social media. Not replacing Google. EDIT: Though the technique may work well for general search.
lwat 14y ago
Has Google not been doing this for ages?
- deleted 14y ago
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- warmwaffles 14y ago
  Google wouldn't release that information if it did or didn't. This would make an SEO company filthy rich.
- ehsanu1 14y ago
  Almost surely - though with a different technique perhaps. The only "study" I've seen of it is here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lda-and-googles-rankings-well-correlated http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lda-and-googles-rankings-well-cor...
hokua 14y ago
Definitely Bill Gate's Mini-Me
tg3 14y ago
That interviewer was terrible: > How long have you been interested in computer coding, and searching, and things like that? If you're going to have someone do an interview about computer science, at least let the interviewer be someone with a cursory knowledge of the field.
- rodly 14y ago
  Agreed. "So what's your next step?" "Well, I might do this..." 15 seconds in, "Okay sorry to cut you off short, I'm a terrible interviewer and my degree is in liberal arts, you're smart and stuff bye."
  - LVB 14y ago
    The kid blew it by saying "Markov chains"! I'm sure they hit the silent alarm pretty quickly after that.
    - asto 14y ago
      Blew it? What's the point of interviewing a smart kid if you want him to be dumb during the interview?
      - batista 14y ago
        No, they want him to be smart enough to tailor his response to the audience. Feynman was a smart guy, by all measures, but he knew how to speak at the appropriate level for his audience.
      - LVB 14y ago
        Intended to be sarcasm... I actually think the kid did a great job and the interviewer was pretty useless.
  - jmduke 14y ago
    Ah, classic, another liberal arts degree bash! Making your point without denigrating an entire educational system is usually feasible.
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spaghetti 14y ago
If it's so great why aren't I using it right now? After my first Google search in 2000 I was hooked. Does the article actually link to anything related to his computer coding? Oh wait here it is: http://www.cuil.com http://www.cuil.com
- hokua 14y ago
  Well he is only 17. Did you know about Markov chains when you were 17?
  - spaghetti 14y ago
    I didn't. His accomplishments sound pretty awesome! My reply above was directed more at the article and it's lack of links to the guy's work. After watching the interview I just wanted to try some searches but there was no link.
  - srj55 14y ago
    Not to diminish his work in any way, but markov chains are (were?) part of the senior finite math curriculum in Ontario. E.g. We used them to examine weather prediction models in gr. 12
    - hokua 14y ago
      Wow. The most wonkish think I remember from high school is learning about the Balmer series (atom spectral emissions)
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  - alexyoung 14y ago
    I wrote an IRC bot with them when I was 18, and I'm not particularly smart. Also, the bot wasn't particularly smart.
cantbecool 14y ago
If I have to see another story with 'XYZ YEAR OLD BUILDS XYZ', I'm going to go thermonuclear war on HN. Adolescents have been exposed to high speed internet and technology before they can even remember. What do you expect is going to happen, honestly?
- boyter 14y ago
  Its a good point. Had I have all the resources I have now I would imagine I would have made all sorts of things at that age. Even without them I was building things like Enigma machines, games and such in QBasic. This isn't about belittling this guys achievements, but realizing that with the free software movement and the internet in general the barrier of entry has dropped so much that stories like this are naturally going to become increasingly common.
  - cantbecool 14y ago
    I absolutely agree with your sentiments on the matter. When you're a child you're essentially a sponge, I wonder what teenagers like himself will be producing within the next two decades.
- lumberjack 14y ago
  While the internet was probably a good source of information I'd play it down to mentorship as the decisive factor. In all of these cases, the successful teenagers seem to be lucky enough to either have a good private mentor, be enrolled in a mentorship program, or be enrolled in a highschool famous for the encouragement and resources that it provides to it's enterprising students. In contrast many of us would have been told to "aim for a simpler project" if we proposed something like that to our computer science teachers.
  - a_bonobo 14y ago
    Your post summarizes Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers on extremely successful people quite well - it's mostly being born to a) rich parents who can afford to pay for extra-curricular activity, good schools or who have the time to "improve" their kids or b) being around schools or universities that can recognise the talent and give talented kids the input and resources they need. Both a) and b) are based on pure luck. For an example, check out Bill Gates' early life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Early_life Rich parents, exclusive school (with their own computer! unheard of at the time) and local companies that let Gates and other kids screw around on their computers. Luck!
tlrobinson 14y ago
The biggest reason I immediately switched to Google when I first tried it was Google only matched documents containing exactly the words I searched for, nothing more. It's fine (and good) if search engines add more intelligence like this, but I'll always need a way to search for exact phrases. The default behavior of Google is much "fuzzier" than it was 5 years ago, so I'm surprised they don't already do something like this (or do they?)
- rblackwater 14y ago
  That's a good point. It's sometimes difficult trying to search for programming topics now. "Did you mean UIView?" No, Google, I really did mean NSView.
  - haberman 14y ago
    "Did you mean" is just a suggestion. It doesn't change your search results AFAIK.
    - wahnfrieden 14y ago
      If it's confident enough, it does.
      - haberman 14y ago
        Yes but that's a different message ("Showing results for..."), and there's a link to force a search for the original term. For me it's right at least 50% of the time that it does this (probably much more, but I can confidently say >50%), so it's a net win for me personally.
    - rblackwater 14y ago
      You are right, I remembered wrong for that one. It usually does "Showing results for ... UIView click here to see results for ... NSView". Sometimes I encounter something that gets changed without the option to search for what I typed and I have to quote it.
Miner49er 14y ago
He read the Harry Potter books when he was 6?!
- godDLL 14y ago
  First time I read Bulgakov's "Master & Margarita" was when I was 7. Enjoyed it very much. But it was only two years later that I read it again, and this time was left with no questions. See the first time I read it, many things were more grownup than my understanding of such matters could be at that age. And unless it's "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", I'm not that impressed anyway.
  - madmax108 14y ago
    <sarcasm> Yes, we're all geniuses here </sarcasm> I read The Master & Margarita when I was 9 (or 10) AND my first Harry Potter around the same time... and yes, I enjoyed both of them thoroughly! :)
DigitalSea 14y ago
In this day and age building "X is better than well known Y product" means nothing. You could build a car with 5 times the gas mileage of any car around today and I bet you'll be hard pressed to make a dime for the first few years while competing with the likes of Ford, Toyota or General Motors. People don't care about things being better when it comes to the web, people stick with what they know and if you're a Google user like me who is also vested in Gmail, Google Docs, Google Analytics, Google Adwords, etc then you're in too deep to switch to any other search engine. I remember Cuil when it launched. They were onto something great, made some pretty bold claims and in many ways were better than Google at search and look what happened to them? Nobody cared and they died in a huge internet tire fire. Sure the issues with poor results didn't help and people wanted them to succeed but lets be honest here, Cuil would have ended up like Bing (a few users but nothing to gloat about). People are too lazy to switch to anything new especially when it comes to search, it takes time to woo a user from another product that still does the job perfectly. Having said that, this kid is 17 and he's done a f*cking amazing job. How many people can say at the age of 17 they built anything remotely cool like this? I'm sure some can, but not many. If he keeps on this path, he'll be achieving bigger things in his 20's and 30's than this and it'll be well-deserved. The interviewer was pretty bad though, he had no clue whatsoever an insult to the kid they were interviewing who deserves at least an interviewer with a remotely above average IQ.
- enjo 14y ago
  Cuil is an interesting example, but I have a very different recollection of it. Cuil may have been on to something great, but their technology didn't produce results. To say "nobody cared" is completely false. They launched to pretty serious fanfare. The technology press was, for a brief period, infatuated with the idea of ex-Googlers killing Google. It was the technology that failed. The results were a mess and very often completely irrelevant. Cuil was well positioned to compete head-to-head with Google, but they failed to execute. I gave them a shot and they sent me right back into Google's arms (I did the same with DDG as well fwiw). I think search, more than anything else, is an area that gives you the best chance of gaining a toe-hold against a monolithic company like Google. Although you'll be acquired the moment you gain any real traction:)
- 14y ago
econner 14y ago
Essentially: PageRank where nodes are words and edges are occurrence in the same document. Really cool idea. Great work. I love to see this kind of stuff.
wickedchicken 14y ago
Armchair analysis of his algorithm after watching his TED talk: a version of LSA that uses PageRank instead of a straight SVD to calculate rankings. LSA[1] has been around since the 80s and is used in many applications from GRE testing to Apple's junk mail filtering[2]. It's used a lot since the patent expired, it's relatively good and can be computed quickly. Of course, a lot of text-retrieval research has happened in the past few decades, one of my favorites being LDA[3] which relies on a much more sound statistical basis than finding lower-dimensional representations of term-document vectors. Unfortunately LDA's model is not directly computable and answers must be determined via Monte-Carlo methods. As for 'indepdendence,' his terminology gets a little confused here. At first I thought he was talking about the 'bag-of-words' assumption that most large-scale language models have. These effectively ignore grammar (other than stemming) in order to efficiently determine the 'gist' of a document without its intricacies. However, his videos imply he is talking about word-sense disambiguation[4], which is certainly known about and was the crux of LSA in the first place. If he is talking about lifting the bag-of-words assumption, there has been some interesting work going on, such as [5] (disclaimer: I am a coauthor on that paper). If you're interested in this stuff, I highly recommend trying out the LSA demo server at [6] (it can get swamped sometimes so don't kill it) and David Blei's LDA implementation at [7]. The LDA-C inputs and parameters are a little obtuse when you first look at it, and I don't have my notes on how to use it at the moment but if you play around with it it should make sense. This kid is crazy smart, and I hope he gets exposed to a lot of really cool research since he can obviously pull off a lot at a young age. Best of luck to him. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis [2] http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/LSMSmartCategorizer/Introduction/Intro.html http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/LSMSmartC... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word-sense_disambiguation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word-sense_disambiguation [5] http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/D/D12/D12-1020.pdf http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/D/D12/D12-1020.pdf [6] http://lsa.colorado.edu/ http://lsa.colorado.edu/ [7] http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/lda-c/ http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/lda-c/
- mikkom 14y ago
  LSA patent has expired? Thanks for info, I didn't know that.
richardburton 14y ago
What I found amazing was the contract between the interviewer's grasp of the English language when compared to the interviewee.
akrymski 14y ago
This kid would definitely make a great marketing person. There's absolutely nothing new in what he's done but he's presenting it really well, thumbs up to his parents who have probably done quite a bit of the work ;) When I was 18 (10 years ago) I did loads of research into that stuff and knew just as much about information retrieval, vector space tf-ids models, latent semantic indexing, wordnet analysis, etc. At the time it was fairly cutting edge research. This stuff isn't anything new now, I was actually forced to decipher some research papers instead of reading popular books on the subject. It was fairly obvious to me back then that none of these techniques worked well for general web search. I did end up building a system that clustered google search results (in realtime) into DMOZ categories letting you refine your search results by clicking a category (which was actually useful and worked quite well in case you were searching for something ambiguous like "jaguar"). None of these techniques are new to anyone working in information retrieval. Just looking at co-occurrence of words in tweets and expanding the query with some related terms (weighted appropriately) would probably achieve what he has done (weekend project for an average dev). I'd call this kid really smart if he'd actually figure out how to improve general web search, or could think of a useful application at least. Talking about existing research and making it look like your own isn't great form in my opinion. Coming up with your own definition for a "word" just makes you look stuck up. Much better off acknowledging work of other researchers and quoting them, although that would never generate as much press I guess. Sorry if the rant is quite negative, I'm just getting a bit fed up with all the marketing surrounding "young geniuses" and teenage entrepreneurs these days. If I wanted to read that stuff I'd get the local paper.
- nschiefer 14y ago
  Most of your feedback is perfectly fair. My algorithm was not meant for general search, not am I a "young genius" or anything of the sort. Similarly, techniques like tf-idf, latent semantic analysis, document modelling, and even pseudo-relevance feedback expansion are no longer "cutting edge" techniques. However, your blanket characterization that "there's absolutely nothing new" in my work and that I just talked "about existing research" while "making it look like [my] own" is somewhat offensive. Based on a fairly extensive review of the literature, the algorithm that I developed is novel and seems to outperform a number of these standard techniques on short document like tweets. As for "just looking at co-occurrence," that's essentially a type of pseudo-relevance feedback expansion and is, of course, well known and easy to implement. Please realize the difference between a news interview published online and the paper I submitted to the fair when assessing the novelty of my work and when suggesting that I made no reference to others' work. Regarding my "definition for a 'word'", I apologize for appearing pretentious. I was asked to speak on the conference's theme of "redefinition" in relation to my research and did the best I could. Finally, I think it's kind of strange that you automatically assumed that my parents even worked on my project. Neither of them are even familiar with the details of the project. My work was my own, and your automatic assumption of what is tantamount of broad academic fraud and plagiarism assumed particularly bad faith. In any case, thanks for your honest feedback; I try to be careful about how I come across and I'll be even more mindful in the future.
PetroFeed 14y ago
I know very little about search but what I love about how he looked at the graph element, exploring relationships between "entities". The relationships between entities in our world holds so much information and yet in most databases it's reduced to a join between tables. Mapping the relationship and capturing the "hidden" information and therefore making it available for use unlocks amazing potential.
nschiefer 14y ago
Hi, this is Nicholas, a long time lurker on HN and the person in the video. I saw this thread during my morning commute to work (and was very surprised, to say the least!) and wanted to register to mention a few important details that the news articles always omit. Hopefully this helps correct a few misconceptions! To begin, I'd like to flatly deny that I "built a better search engine." I did my (very academic) work in information retrieval and developed a new algorithm that seems to give significantly better search results (when compared to other academic search techniques, more on this later) on short documents like Twitter tweets. Specifically, my algorithm uses random walks (modelled as Markov chains) on graphs of terms representing documents to perform a type of semantic smoothing known as document expansion, where a statistical model of a document's meaning (usually based on the words that appear in the document) is expanded to include related words. My system is in no way, shape, or form a "search engine" or even comparable with something like Google---rather, it is an algorithm that could help improve search results in a real, commercial search engine. My work is not, by far, the first to attempt document expansion. A number of related techniques, including pseudo-relevance feedback expansion, translation models, some forms of latent semantic indexing, and some of those mentioned by exg already exist. However, to my knowledge, the knowledge of my science fair juges (some of whom are active IR researchers), and the knowledge of my research mentor (also more on this later), my work is a novel method (not a synthesis of existing methods) that seems to work quite well in comparison to other, similar, algorithms on collections of small documents like tweets. The last point is certainly important: it is simply impossible to compare my algorithm to something like Google, for several reasons. First, I'm not a software engineer or a large company; it is downright impossible for me to craft a combination of algorithms like that found in Google to get comparable results. No commercial search engine would be so foolish as to use only a single algorithm (essentially a single feature, from an ML perspective). Instead, they use hundreds or thousands. Second, it is essentially impossible to compare search engines with any level of scientific rigour. I evaluated my system using a standard corpus of data published by NIST as part of TREC (the Text REtrieval Conference), consisting not only of 16+ million tweets, but also of sample queries and the correct, human-determined results for these queries. However, to achieve statistically comparable results, many variables have to be controlled in a way that is impossible with a large, complex search engine. Instead, the academic approach compares individual algorithms one-on-one and postulates that these can be combined to give better search results in aggregate. Specifically, my research showed that my system achieved above-median scores on the official evaluation metrics of the 2011 Microblog corpus when compared to research groups that published last November. Furthermore, my system did the best of all of the "single algorithm" systems, including those that used other document expansion techniques like I described above. Most of my work was spent on the development of the algorithm, proofs of its convergence and asymptotic complexity, a theoretical framework, and a statistical analysis of my results. Notably absent from this list is engineering. My project is not, by any means, "a toy engineering project" as some commenters have suggested. Actually, the engineering in my project is quite poor, as that area is not one I've had much exposure to. To briefly address my research mentor: my parents had nothing to do with my project other than providing emotional support when I was stressed. I had a research mentor at a university who I found after I did very well at the 2011 Canada-Wide Science Fair. He provided me with important computational and data resources (such as the corpus I used), but did not develop my algorithm, proofs, or code, which were my own work. Given the recent attention of my project (and Jack Andraka's project on cancer detection), I'd like to point out a general trend in news articles about science fair projects. In general, the media has a tendency to focus on the potential applications of a project and ignore the science in it, leading to (seemingly fair) criticism. Using me as an example, the talk about "toy" projects and "synthesis" is fair given how it is portrayed in the media. Somehow, "novel IR algorithm based on Markov chain-based document expansion," even with careful (and thorough!) explanation, gets turned into "Teen builds a better search engine." Similarly, a great friend (and roommate) of mine whose project on drug combinations to treat cystic fibrosis was completely shredded on Reddit when it got significant media attention last year. In his project, he never once claimed or tried to claim that he had done anything with immediate (or even near) medical applications. Instead, he discussed his work to identify molecules that bind to different sites on the damaged protein and can work synergistically as drugs. The media spin-machine quickly turned this into "Teen cures cystic fibrosis" and other such nonsense. Even Jack's project (I know both him and his project), which is unusually "real world" has being overspun by the media. It's just what happens. Heck, people even make fun of it in upper-level science fairs, but it still happens. Finally, thank you for the encouraging words! To finish with a shameless plug, I'd like to point out that, while fairs like ISEF tend to be very well-funded (because of the positive publicity). However, many regional and state (in the US) or national (outside of the US) youth science organizations struggle to find funding (and even volunteers) to run fairs that send people to ISEF. If you ever find yourself in a position where you can help (financially, with your time, whatever), I'd strongly encourage it. Given the impact the science fairs have had on my life, I know that I certainly will.

165 points by adebelov 14y ago

It's not really appropriate to this particular story -- high school student vs VC-funded startup -- but what really bugs me about all "the next Google" reporting is that they ignore the biggest gotcha of search: corpus size matters. The secret sauce of a successful search engine isn't the core algorithm which handles 90% of the work 90% of the time, it's the millions of tweaks which keep the millions of pathological cases from making every query useless. On a small enough corpora, even grep does a great job. But once you are trying to search the world, it stops being an insight problem; at scale there are so many corner cases that you can't ignore them.

koide 14y ago

I was instantly reminded of David Evans (from UVA and Udacity fame: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/ http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/) listening to this kid, both physically and in his manner of speech. I really expect to... eeeh... see more of him in the future.

enjo 14y ago

A much better explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmxNuVDJZEY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmxNuVDJZEY

sosuke 14y ago
One of those ideas that, after you hear it, you think ya, that makes total sense, why isn't this already being done? Very cool project idea to be working on still in high school. Edit: This is 2011? Anyone know if something usable came out of this? http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science-fair-gold-medalist-17-invents-better-way-to-search-internet/article600329/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science-fair-gold-...
- ehsanu1 14y ago
  Who says it isn't already being done? I'm pretty damn sure Google and Bing do some sort of topic modeling (LDA, LSA or something else) that basically does the same thing - though the exact method is not the same. Watching the TED talk, he seemed to be comparing his search results to that of some academic search engine, which are generally very dumb and purely keyword based. Google does a whole lot more than that. Kudos to the guy for figuring this all out on his own, but I don't think this research is as original as portrayed by the media here.
- anothermachine 14y ago
  It's not novel work. It's an toy implementation of standard technology. It's impressive for a young person to understand and synthesize the components, but it's an engineering practice project, not an innovation.

naner 14y ago

...for the social-media world His search is focused on short text blurbs from social media. Not replacing Google. EDIT: Though the technique may work well for general search.

lwat 14y ago

Has Google not been doing this for ages?

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warmwaffles 14y ago
Google wouldn't release that information if it did or didn't. This would make an SEO company filthy rich.
ehsanu1 14y ago
Almost surely - though with a different technique perhaps. The only "study" I've seen of it is here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lda-and-googles-rankings-well-correlated http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lda-and-googles-rankings-well-cor...

hokua 14y ago

Definitely Bill Gate's Mini-Me

tg3 14y ago

That interviewer was terrible: > How long have you been interested in computer coding, and searching, and things like that? If you're going to have someone do an interview about computer science, at least let the interviewer be someone with a cursory knowledge of the field.

rodly 14y ago
Agreed. "So what's your next step?" "Well, I might do this..." 15 seconds in, "Okay sorry to cut you off short, I'm a terrible interviewer and my degree is in liberal arts, you're smart and stuff bye."
- LVB 14y ago
  The kid blew it by saying "Markov chains"! I'm sure they hit the silent alarm pretty quickly after that.
  - asto 14y ago
    Blew it? What's the point of interviewing a smart kid if you want him to be dumb during the interview?
    - batista 14y ago
      No, they want him to be smart enough to tailor his response to the audience. Feynman was a smart guy, by all measures, but he knew how to speak at the appropriate level for his audience.
    - LVB 14y ago
      Intended to be sarcasm... I actually think the kid did a great job and the interviewer was pretty useless.
- jmduke 14y ago
  Ah, classic, another liberal arts degree bash! Making your point without denigrating an entire educational system is usually feasible.

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spaghetti 14y ago

If it's so great why aren't I using it right now? After my first Google search in 2000 I was hooked. Does the article actually link to anything related to his computer coding? Oh wait here it is: http://www.cuil.com http://www.cuil.com

hokua 14y ago
Well he is only 17. Did you know about Markov chains when you were 17?
- spaghetti 14y ago
  I didn't. His accomplishments sound pretty awesome! My reply above was directed more at the article and it's lack of links to the guy's work. After watching the interview I just wanted to try some searches but there was no link.
- srj55 14y ago
  Not to diminish his work in any way, but markov chains are (were?) part of the senior finite math curriculum in Ontario. E.g. We used them to examine weather prediction models in gr. 12
  - hokua 14y ago
    Wow. The most wonkish think I remember from high school is learning about the Balmer series (atom spectral emissions)
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- alexyoung 14y ago
  I wrote an IRC bot with them when I was 18, and I'm not particularly smart. Also, the bot wasn't particularly smart.

cantbecool 14y ago

If I have to see another story with 'XYZ YEAR OLD BUILDS XYZ', I'm going to go thermonuclear war on HN. Adolescents have been exposed to high speed internet and technology before they can even remember. What do you expect is going to happen, honestly?

boyter 14y ago
Its a good point. Had I have all the resources I have now I would imagine I would have made all sorts of things at that age. Even without them I was building things like Enigma machines, games and such in QBasic. This isn't about belittling this guys achievements, but realizing that with the free software movement and the internet in general the barrier of entry has dropped so much that stories like this are naturally going to become increasingly common.
- cantbecool 14y ago
  I absolutely agree with your sentiments on the matter. When you're a child you're essentially a sponge, I wonder what teenagers like himself will be producing within the next two decades.
lumberjack 14y ago
While the internet was probably a good source of information I'd play it down to mentorship as the decisive factor. In all of these cases, the successful teenagers seem to be lucky enough to either have a good private mentor, be enrolled in a mentorship program, or be enrolled in a highschool famous for the encouragement and resources that it provides to it's enterprising students. In contrast many of us would have been told to "aim for a simpler project" if we proposed something like that to our computer science teachers.
- a_bonobo 14y ago
  Your post summarizes Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers on extremely successful people quite well - it's mostly being born to a) rich parents who can afford to pay for extra-curricular activity, good schools or who have the time to "improve" their kids or b) being around schools or universities that can recognise the talent and give talented kids the input and resources they need. Both a) and b) are based on pure luck. For an example, check out Bill Gates' early life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Early_life Rich parents, exclusive school (with their own computer! unheard of at the time) and local companies that let Gates and other kids screw around on their computers. Luck!

tlrobinson 14y ago

The biggest reason I immediately switched to Google when I first tried it was Google only matched documents containing exactly the words I searched for, nothing more. It's fine (and good) if search engines add more intelligence like this, but I'll always need a way to search for exact phrases. The default behavior of Google is much "fuzzier" than it was 5 years ago, so I'm surprised they don't already do something like this (or do they?)

rblackwater 14y ago
That's a good point. It's sometimes difficult trying to search for programming topics now. "Did you mean UIView?" No, Google, I really did mean NSView.
- haberman 14y ago
  "Did you mean" is just a suggestion. It doesn't change your search results AFAIK.
  - wahnfrieden 14y ago
    If it's confident enough, it does.
    - haberman 14y ago
      Yes but that's a different message ("Showing results for..."), and there's a link to force a search for the original term. For me it's right at least 50% of the time that it does this (probably much more, but I can confidently say >50%), so it's a net win for me personally.
  - rblackwater 14y ago
    You are right, I remembered wrong for that one. It usually does "Showing results for ... UIView click here to see results for ... NSView". Sometimes I encounter something that gets changed without the option to search for what I typed and I have to quote it.

Miner49er 14y ago

He read the Harry Potter books when he was 6?!

godDLL 14y ago
First time I read Bulgakov's "Master & Margarita" was when I was 7. Enjoyed it very much. But it was only two years later that I read it again, and this time was left with no questions. See the first time I read it, many things were more grownup than my understanding of such matters could be at that age. And unless it's "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", I'm not that impressed anyway.
- madmax108 14y ago
  <sarcasm> Yes, we're all geniuses here </sarcasm> I read The Master & Margarita when I was 9 (or 10) AND my first Harry Potter around the same time... and yes, I enjoyed both of them thoroughly! :)

DigitalSea 14y ago

In this day and age building "X is better than well known Y product" means nothing. You could build a car with 5 times the gas mileage of any car around today and I bet you'll be hard pressed to make a dime for the first few years while competing with the likes of Ford, Toyota or General Motors. People don't care about things being better when it comes to the web, people stick with what they know and if you're a Google user like me who is also vested in Gmail, Google Docs, Google Analytics, Google Adwords, etc then you're in too deep to switch to any other search engine. I remember Cuil when it launched. They were onto something great, made some pretty bold claims and in many ways were better than Google at search and look what happened to them? Nobody cared and they died in a huge internet tire fire. Sure the issues with poor results didn't help and people wanted them to succeed but lets be honest here, Cuil would have ended up like Bing (a few users but nothing to gloat about). People are too lazy to switch to anything new especially when it comes to search, it takes time to woo a user from another product that still does the job perfectly. Having said that, this kid is 17 and he's done a f*cking amazing job. How many people can say at the age of 17 they built anything remotely cool like this? I'm sure some can, but not many. If he keeps on this path, he'll be achieving bigger things in his 20's and 30's than this and it'll be well-deserved. The interviewer was pretty bad though, he had no clue whatsoever an insult to the kid they were interviewing who deserves at least an interviewer with a remotely above average IQ.

enjo 14y ago
Cuil is an interesting example, but I have a very different recollection of it. Cuil may have been on to something great, but their technology didn't produce results. To say "nobody cared" is completely false. They launched to pretty serious fanfare. The technology press was, for a brief period, infatuated with the idea of ex-Googlers killing Google. It was the technology that failed. The results were a mess and very often completely irrelevant. Cuil was well positioned to compete head-to-head with Google, but they failed to execute. I gave them a shot and they sent me right back into Google's arms (I did the same with DDG as well fwiw). I think search, more than anything else, is an area that gives you the best chance of gaining a toe-hold against a monolithic company like Google. Although you'll be acquired the moment you gain any real traction:)
14y ago

econner 14y ago

Essentially: PageRank where nodes are words and edges are occurrence in the same document. Really cool idea. Great work. I love to see this kind of stuff.

wickedchicken 14y ago

Armchair analysis of his algorithm after watching his TED talk: a version of LSA that uses PageRank instead of a straight SVD to calculate rankings. LSA[1] has been around since the 80s and is used in many applications from GRE testing to Apple's junk mail filtering[2]. It's used a lot since the patent expired, it's relatively good and can be computed quickly. Of course, a lot of text-retrieval research has happened in the past few decades, one of my favorites being LDA[3] which relies on a much more sound statistical basis than finding lower-dimensional representations of term-document vectors. Unfortunately LDA's model is not directly computable and answers must be determined via Monte-Carlo methods. As for 'indepdendence,' his terminology gets a little confused here. At first I thought he was talking about the 'bag-of-words' assumption that most large-scale language models have. These effectively ignore grammar (other than stemming) in order to efficiently determine the 'gist' of a document without its intricacies. However, his videos imply he is talking about word-sense disambiguation[4], which is certainly known about and was the crux of LSA in the first place. If he is talking about lifting the bag-of-words assumption, there has been some interesting work going on, such as [5] (disclaimer: I am a coauthor on that paper). If you're interested in this stuff, I highly recommend trying out the LSA demo server at [6] (it can get swamped sometimes so don't kill it) and David Blei's LDA implementation at [7]. The LDA-C inputs and parameters are a little obtuse when you first look at it, and I don't have my notes on how to use it at the moment but if you play around with it it should make sense. This kid is crazy smart, and I hope he gets exposed to a lot of really cool research since he can obviously pull off a lot at a young age. Best of luck to him. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis [2] http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/LSMSmartCategorizer/Introduction/Intro.html http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/LSMSmartC... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word-sense_disambiguation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word-sense_disambiguation [5] http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/D/D12/D12-1020.pdf http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/D/D12/D12-1020.pdf [6] http://lsa.colorado.edu/ http://lsa.colorado.edu/ [7] http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/lda-c/ http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/lda-c/

mikkom 14y ago
LSA patent has expired? Thanks for info, I didn't know that.

richardburton 14y ago

What I found amazing was the contract between the interviewer's grasp of the English language when compared to the interviewee.

akrymski 14y ago

This kid would definitely make a great marketing person. There's absolutely nothing new in what he's done but he's presenting it really well, thumbs up to his parents who have probably done quite a bit of the work ;) When I was 18 (10 years ago) I did loads of research into that stuff and knew just as much about information retrieval, vector space tf-ids models, latent semantic indexing, wordnet analysis, etc. At the time it was fairly cutting edge research. This stuff isn't anything new now, I was actually forced to decipher some research papers instead of reading popular books on the subject. It was fairly obvious to me back then that none of these techniques worked well for general web search. I did end up building a system that clustered google search results (in realtime) into DMOZ categories letting you refine your search results by clicking a category (which was actually useful and worked quite well in case you were searching for something ambiguous like "jaguar"). None of these techniques are new to anyone working in information retrieval. Just looking at co-occurrence of words in tweets and expanding the query with some related terms (weighted appropriately) would probably achieve what he has done (weekend project for an average dev). I'd call this kid really smart if he'd actually figure out how to improve general web search, or could think of a useful application at least. Talking about existing research and making it look like your own isn't great form in my opinion. Coming up with your own definition for a "word" just makes you look stuck up. Much better off acknowledging work of other researchers and quoting them, although that would never generate as much press I guess. Sorry if the rant is quite negative, I'm just getting a bit fed up with all the marketing surrounding "young geniuses" and teenage entrepreneurs these days. If I wanted to read that stuff I'd get the local paper.

nschiefer 14y ago
Most of your feedback is perfectly fair. My algorithm was not meant for general search, not am I a "young genius" or anything of the sort. Similarly, techniques like tf-idf, latent semantic analysis, document modelling, and even pseudo-relevance feedback expansion are no longer "cutting edge" techniques. However, your blanket characterization that "there's absolutely nothing new" in my work and that I just talked "about existing research" while "making it look like [my] own" is somewhat offensive. Based on a fairly extensive review of the literature, the algorithm that I developed is novel and seems to outperform a number of these standard techniques on short document like tweets. As for "just looking at co-occurrence," that's essentially a type of pseudo-relevance feedback expansion and is, of course, well known and easy to implement. Please realize the difference between a news interview published online and the paper I submitted to the fair when assessing the novelty of my work and when suggesting that I made no reference to others' work. Regarding my "definition for a 'word'", I apologize for appearing pretentious. I was asked to speak on the conference's theme of "redefinition" in relation to my research and did the best I could. Finally, I think it's kind of strange that you automatically assumed that my parents even worked on my project. Neither of them are even familiar with the details of the project. My work was my own, and your automatic assumption of what is tantamount of broad academic fraud and plagiarism assumed particularly bad faith. In any case, thanks for your honest feedback; I try to be careful about how I come across and I'll be even more mindful in the future.

PetroFeed 14y ago

I know very little about search but what I love about how he looked at the graph element, exploring relationships between "entities". The relationships between entities in our world holds so much information and yet in most databases it's reduced to a join between tables. Mapping the relationship and capturing the "hidden" information and therefore making it available for use unlocks amazing potential.

nschiefer 14y ago

Hi, this is Nicholas, a long time lurker on HN and the person in the video. I saw this thread during my morning commute to work (and was very surprised, to say the least!) and wanted to register to mention a few important details that the news articles always omit. Hopefully this helps correct a few misconceptions! To begin, I'd like to flatly deny that I "built a better search engine." I did my (very academic) work in information retrieval and developed a new algorithm that seems to give significantly better search results (when compared to other academic search techniques, more on this later) on short documents like Twitter tweets. Specifically, my algorithm uses random walks (modelled as Markov chains) on graphs of terms representing documents to perform a type of semantic smoothing known as document expansion, where a statistical model of a document's meaning (usually based on the words that appear in the document) is expanded to include related words. My system is in no way, shape, or form a "search engine" or even comparable with something like Google---rather, it is an algorithm that could help improve search results in a real, commercial search engine. My work is not, by far, the first to attempt document expansion. A number of related techniques, including pseudo-relevance feedback expansion, translation models, some forms of latent semantic indexing, and some of those mentioned by exg already exist. However, to my knowledge, the knowledge of my science fair juges (some of whom are active IR researchers), and the knowledge of my research mentor (also more on this later), my work is a novel method (not a synthesis of existing methods) that seems to work quite well in comparison to other, similar, algorithms on collections of small documents like tweets. The last point is certainly important: it is simply impossible to compare my algorithm to something like Google, for several reasons. First, I'm not a software engineer or a large company; it is downright impossible for me to craft a combination of algorithms like that found in Google to get comparable results. No commercial search engine would be so foolish as to use only a single algorithm (essentially a single feature, from an ML perspective). Instead, they use hundreds or thousands. Second, it is essentially impossible to compare search engines with any level of scientific rigour. I evaluated my system using a standard corpus of data published by NIST as part of TREC (the Text REtrieval Conference), consisting not only of 16+ million tweets, but also of sample queries and the correct, human-determined results for these queries. However, to achieve statistically comparable results, many variables have to be controlled in a way that is impossible with a large, complex search engine. Instead, the academic approach compares individual algorithms one-on-one and postulates that these can be combined to give better search results in aggregate. Specifically, my research showed that my system achieved above-median scores on the official evaluation metrics of the 2011 Microblog corpus when compared to research groups that published last November. Furthermore, my system did the best of all of the "single algorithm" systems, including those that used other document expansion techniques like I described above. Most of my work was spent on the development of the algorithm, proofs of its convergence and asymptotic complexity, a theoretical framework, and a statistical analysis of my results. Notably absent from this list is engineering. My project is not, by any means, "a toy engineering project" as some commenters have suggested. Actually, the engineering in my project is quite poor, as that area is not one I've had much exposure to. To briefly address my research mentor: my parents had nothing to do with my project other than providing emotional support when I was stressed. I had a research mentor at a university who I found after I did very well at the 2011 Canada-Wide Science Fair. He provided me with important computational and data resources (such as the corpus I used), but did not develop my algorithm, proofs, or code, which were my own work. Given the recent attention of my project (and Jack Andraka's project on cancer detection), I'd like to point out a general trend in news articles about science fair projects. In general, the media has a tendency to focus on the potential applications of a project and ignore the science in it, leading to (seemingly fair) criticism. Using me as an example, the talk about "toy" projects and "synthesis" is fair given how it is portrayed in the media. Somehow, "novel IR algorithm based on Markov chain-based document expansion," even with careful (and thorough!) explanation, gets turned into "Teen builds a better search engine." Similarly, a great friend (and roommate) of mine whose project on drug combinations to treat cystic fibrosis was completely shredded on Reddit when it got significant media attention last year. In his project, he never once claimed or tried to claim that he had done anything with immediate (or even near) medical applications. Instead, he discussed his work to identify molecules that bind to different sites on the damaged protein and can work synergistically as drugs. The media spin-machine quickly turned this into "Teen cures cystic fibrosis" and other such nonsense. Even Jack's project (I know both him and his project), which is unusually "real world" has being overspun by the media. It's just what happens. Heck, people even make fun of it in upper-level science fairs, but it still happens. Finally, thank you for the encouraging words! To finish with a shameless plug, I'd like to point out that, while fairs like ISEF tend to be very well-funded (because of the positive publicity). However, many regional and state (in the US) or national (outside of the US) youth science organizations struggle to find funding (and even volunteers) to run fairs that send people to ISEF. If you ever find yourself in a position where you can help (financially, with your time, whatever), I'd strongly encourage it. Given the impact the science fairs have had on my life, I know that I certainly will.