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My wife and I just moved into a new house, and on more than one occasion we've foolishly tried to Google the following: "restaurants open right now" or "restau

by byoung2 14y ago

My wife and I just moved into a new house, and on more than one occasion we've foolishly tried to Google the following: "restaurants open right now" or "restaurants that deliver here" As a software engineer, I know these queries won't work, but I keep hoping that one day Google will surprise me. It should be hard to parse "right now" to be the current local time, and limit the search to my current location. The same is true of the other query. Google has local restaurants along with attributes like "delivery" so it should be possible.

anigbrowl 14y ago
It's only quite recently that Maps seems to have developed a (basic) understanding of 'home'. When I'm looking up directions and type home without any other qualifiers, it shouldn't be asking me if I mean 'Home Depot'. Especially not since I give permissions to Google Latitude and my phone and computer are in fact being operated from my designated 'home' location. For that matter, my contacts in Android and google+ let me classify people as friends, work contacts etc., but I've found no way to explain to it that Mrs. Anigbrowl is my wife as distinct from any other family member. BTW please upvote threads like this when you reply to them. Many interesting discussions fall off the new page unnoticed despite having promising replies.
- nostrademons 14y ago
  Friend of mine was telling me how she has a friend who was doing an investment banking internship this summer, and Google Now inferred "home" to be her office (presumably because she was always there at 1:30 in the morning). I can't tell whether this is an embarrassing mistake or an embarrassing success.
whichdan 14y ago
Do services like GrubHub or Foodler cover your area?
milohoffman 14y ago
OOC, why do you say "as a software engineer, I know these queries won't work"? What is it about those queries that leads the engineer in you to believe they are hard (not to say that they aren't, it just seems to me that Google provides remarkable results for many objectively tougher queries).
- gusgordon 14y ago
  I think I can answer this question. In order for Google to actually understand these, the people at Google must manually code for this sort of query, unlike other queries where results are automatically generated. And even then, Google doesn't really "understand" them, it just knows what to spit out when the query is a match. Google has some stuff manually coded in like this, but it's almost impossible to include everything, especially when people can say "places to eat that are open now near my house" vs. "restaurants open near here" vs. hundreds of other possibilities. That's the first layer of difficulty. More difficulty comes with finding the search user's location, determining what stores are actually restaurants (is a lunch deli a restaurant at 8pm?), etc. Then for example, determining which restaurants can deliver that are open now is another difficulty. That said, I'd bet that Google will be able to handle these queries well in 1-3 years.

by byoung2 14y ago

anigbrowl 14y ago

It's only quite recently that Maps seems to have developed a (basic) understanding of 'home'. When I'm looking up directions and type home without any other qualifiers, it shouldn't be asking me if I mean 'Home Depot'. Especially not since I give permissions to Google Latitude and my phone and computer are in fact being operated from my designated 'home' location. For that matter, my contacts in Android and google+ let me classify people as friends, work contacts etc., but I've found no way to explain to it that Mrs. Anigbrowl is my wife as distinct from any other family member. BTW please upvote threads like this when you reply to them. Many interesting discussions fall off the new page unnoticed despite having promising replies.

nostrademons 14y ago
Friend of mine was telling me how she has a friend who was doing an investment banking internship this summer, and Google Now inferred "home" to be her office (presumably because she was always there at 1:30 in the morning). I can't tell whether this is an embarrassing mistake or an embarrassing success.

whichdan 14y ago

Do services like GrubHub or Foodler cover your area?

milohoffman 14y ago

OOC, why do you say "as a software engineer, I know these queries won't work"? What is it about those queries that leads the engineer in you to believe they are hard (not to say that they aren't, it just seems to me that Google provides remarkable results for many objectively tougher queries).

gusgordon 14y ago
I think I can answer this question. In order for Google to actually understand these, the people at Google must manually code for this sort of query, unlike other queries where results are automatically generated. And even then, Google doesn't really "understand" them, it just knows what to spit out when the query is a match. Google has some stuff manually coded in like this, but it's almost impossible to include everything, especially when people can say "places to eat that are open now near my house" vs. "restaurants open near here" vs. hundreds of other possibilities. That's the first layer of difficulty. More difficulty comes with finding the search user's location, determining what stores are actually restaurants (is a lunch deli a restaurant at 8pm?), etc. Then for example, determining which restaurants can deliver that are open now is another difficulty. That said, I'd bet that Google will be able to handle these queries well in 1-3 years.