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Simple answer - Google has no competition. And the competition has no chance given the scale required to just match, let alone surpass "google quality". This

by Sven7 13y ago

Simple answer - Google has no competition. And the competition has no chance given the scale required to just match, let alone surpass "google quality". This isn't going to change any time soon, unless they create a search market place by opening up their index. If one were to ask Larry Page what his number one priority was, it is a good bet his answer won't be search. Compare what Google has on offer with this http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples Why such a big disparity?

adventured 13y ago
Sure, after all, who could possibly compete with IBM. Or Microsoft. Or AltaVista. I mean, AltaVista - backed by DEC - spent a relative massive amount of money at the time on what seemed like an index of insurmountable scale. Who could ever compete with Facebook? You'd have to spend billions to replicate what they do, just to get off the ground. The reason you're wrong, is because paradigm shifts is what matters, not chasing the past. That's the opening that makes it possible to replace Google (not compete head-on with them). I don't care how well organized Google is, they're so large now, they will run into the same clumsy elephant problem that every other mega company in world history has. The problem isn't that Google has no competition. You should not be trying to solve the problem Google solved in 1998. That is over, they're riding the benefits of a solution from 15 years ago, extrapolated forward and polished. You never compete head on with the past, you're guaranteed to die that way. You chase the future and replace the past. Look for the inflection, and bury Google in the past accordingly. Need a better example? Windows was feared as a practical god of wrath in technology circa 1997/98. Who could ever hire enough engineers to write the tens of millions of lines of code to compete with that? It was the omnipotent titan that could never be challenged. Want the Windows obituary? It reads as follows: it never was challenged, it was replaced by the future that looked nothing like Windows 95/XP/Vista/8/etc. The future begins with a new - obvious in hindsight - solution to a massive problem. Typically this solution will start out simple in concept, but can scale massively. It is almost always extremely cheap to instigate (relative to the value long term). See: PageRank. The future does not begin by going after a leviathan like Google and playing the game the way they do, and spending money like they do. It never works that way. Chasing the past is usually the most expensive thing you can ever do. Just ask Bing.
- Sven7 13y ago
  Barrier to entry makes all the difference. You are not going to see a 20 year old Woz or a Torvalds today build an NLP system of any serious utility. They just do not have access to the kind of infrastructure required to do it. So comparisons to OS evolution, MS etc are moot. You need data, clean data and massive amounts of it to do accurate natural language processing. Very few org's have the data required to pull it off. And that can be seen in the limitations of Siri, WolframAlpha and IBM's Watson. The human brain takes a decade or more of processing all kinds of data, to build up a language model good enough to have a productive conversation. So even if these companies come up with the better learning algorithms, required to build up a decent language model, the bottle neck will always be access to quality data. Google has the data, but since they are off busy defending their advertising empire, innovation in search and therefore NLP has taken a backseat. For the paradigm shift in NLP to happen, things like Siri, Watson and WolframAlpha would need access to Google scale/quality data. Google can spur things along by building a marketplace around search so people can access the data.

by Sven7 13y ago

adventured 13y ago

Sure, after all, who could possibly compete with IBM. Or Microsoft. Or AltaVista. I mean, AltaVista - backed by DEC - spent a relative massive amount of money at the time on what seemed like an index of insurmountable scale. Who could ever compete with Facebook? You'd have to spend billions to replicate what they do, just to get off the ground. The reason you're wrong, is because paradigm shifts is what matters, not chasing the past. That's the opening that makes it possible to replace Google (not compete head-on with them). I don't care how well organized Google is, they're so large now, they will run into the same clumsy elephant problem that every other mega company in world history has. The problem isn't that Google has no competition. You should not be trying to solve the problem Google solved in 1998. That is over, they're riding the benefits of a solution from 15 years ago, extrapolated forward and polished. You never compete head on with the past, you're guaranteed to die that way. You chase the future and replace the past. Look for the inflection, and bury Google in the past accordingly. Need a better example? Windows was feared as a practical god of wrath in technology circa 1997/98. Who could ever hire enough engineers to write the tens of millions of lines of code to compete with that? It was the omnipotent titan that could never be challenged. Want the Windows obituary? It reads as follows: it never was challenged, it was replaced by the future that looked nothing like Windows 95/XP/Vista/8/etc. The future begins with a new - obvious in hindsight - solution to a massive problem. Typically this solution will start out simple in concept, but can scale massively. It is almost always extremely cheap to instigate (relative to the value long term). See: PageRank. The future does not begin by going after a leviathan like Google and playing the game the way they do, and spending money like they do. It never works that way. Chasing the past is usually the most expensive thing you can ever do. Just ask Bing.

Sven7 13y ago
Barrier to entry makes all the difference. You are not going to see a 20 year old Woz or a Torvalds today build an NLP system of any serious utility. They just do not have access to the kind of infrastructure required to do it. So comparisons to OS evolution, MS etc are moot. You need data, clean data and massive amounts of it to do accurate natural language processing. Very few org's have the data required to pull it off. And that can be seen in the limitations of Siri, WolframAlpha and IBM's Watson. The human brain takes a decade or more of processing all kinds of data, to build up a language model good enough to have a productive conversation. So even if these companies come up with the better learning algorithms, required to build up a decent language model, the bottle neck will always be access to quality data. Google has the data, but since they are off busy defending their advertising empire, innovation in search and therefore NLP has taken a backseat. For the paradigm shift in NLP to happen, things like Siri, Watson and WolframAlpha would need access to Google scale/quality data. Google can spur things along by building a marketplace around search so people can access the data.