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(disclaimer: I work for Google. My words are not theirs) At first I thought "oh. Google fan fiction. This is what we have come to." After a moment, though, I r

• robterrell 13y ago
  The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to. I would love it if there was a distributed way for people to provide this information without having it live in a centralized datacenter somewhere. That makes sense. Why can't we have both? If Google needs to store all my context data off in the cloud somewhere, why not absolutely guarantee that no one will get my data without my permission or a court order? And then earn my trust by defending my right to data privacy?
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • clobber 13y ago
    > And then earn my trust by defending my right to data privacy? Sadly, they don't have any interest in doing so. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/google-nsa-secrecy-upheld/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/google-nsa-secrecy-...
  • ihsw 13y ago
    Because then you can't sell ads.
    • tonfa 13y ago
      Google could definitly still sell ads (it doesn't need to give private data to third party to do that).
      • gaius 13y ago
        Sure. But if it did, it could sell more ads. Everything Google does is about ad sales. Self driving cars? What are you going to do when your car does the driving for you? Consume media of course, with ads all over it! Etc, etc. Which is not a good or a bad thing in and of itself, it's what they do, like McDonald's sell hamburgers. The question you must ask yourself is do you want Big Mac and Fries for every meal?
        • dragonwriter 13y ago
          > Everything Google does is about ad sales. Interesting contention. Could you explain exactly how paid web services that do not embed advertising that Google provides (paid Google Apps, and backend services like App Engine, Computer Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Datastore, etc.) are "about ad sales" rather than about leveraging Google's core technical competencies in search, cloud storage, and web services to generate non-advertising revenue streams?
• H3g3m0n 13y ago
  >The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to. Sure it can, at least the sense of the person. I don't need your life story to know how to handle simple instructions like "what year was movie X released", or "Gimme a list of all the elements on the periodic table that contain the letter U in their names". Sure things like "What time is my flight" will need details, but "What time is flight QF204" doesn't. The other thing is that the Star Trek computer doesn't have to be in the cloud, it can be on your device. Or it can be both, with the local one keeping your private stuff.
  • hahainternet 13y ago
    > Sure it can, at least the sense of the person. I don't need your life story to know how to handle simple instructions like "what year was movie X released", or "Gimme a list of all the elements on the periodic table that contain the letter U in their names". Then that's not the Star Trek computer is it? That is a personal organiser that responds to voice. Google are clearly aiming beyond this.
  • jmillikin 13y ago
    "what year was movie X released" is an easy query to answer. It doesn't require much context, it doesn't need any information about the user, and movie release dates are widely available in many public sources. But there's no reason that search engines should be limited to trivial searches of public data. A modern search engine needs to be able to handle situations like: * User has a reservation at a local restaurant, so they ask [where's lunch] and want to receive the time and location of their reservation. And they want driving directions, unless they don't own a car, in which case they want directions from the nearest public transport. * User just got back from Hawaii and wants to show their coworkers a photo they took of a cool wave. So they search for [wave picture] and want the picture they took to be in their search results. * User is writing a PhD thesis on tree rings and found a useful article last month, but now they want to cite it and can't remember what it was called. So they search for [article about tree rings] and want that particular article to be the first result. In other words, the 2001 model of a search engine as "grep for the web" is far behind what people expect in 2013.
• mindcrime 13y ago
  Every argument is trivial to win if you first convert your opponent into Mecha-Hitler. Not everything is an argument that needs to be "won" or "lost" though. Sometimes an article is just an article, that's meant to spark a discussion around a topic. Even if the article seems to overtly take a position, that's kind of irrelevant if you think that it's the resulting discussion that matters. Given some of the discussion we see in this very HN post, I'd say this article succeeded in that regard.
  • ok_craig 13y ago
    What sucks is that there was already a topic to discuss, and the author changed it. The original idea was simply a place with fewer restrictions, and the author instead decided to talk about a fantasy island anarchy with no rule of law and ridiculous scenarios. So we can talk about that, if we want. But it seems a lot less interesting and much easier to judge that the actual original idea. What if we really did have a place where we could use driverless cars on the road right now? Where maybe we didn't have to wait for 10 year trials to start using potentially groundbreaking drugs? Where tax money that would otherwise go to the war on drugs, instead goes to health clinics, and drugs are fully legal. Where maybe the education system isn't set up so that kids forcefully progress at the same rate, with kids of the same age, for the first full 18 years of their lives, without a break, instead of being able to learn at their own pace. I think there are so many kinds of interesting things to be discussed, which are realistic and apply to our world today. But publications like Wired are apparently not interested in discussing them; only discounting the idea wholesale so they don't have to put any real effort in.
  • prawks 13y ago
    > Even if the article seems to overtly take a position, that's kind of irrelevant if you think that it's the resulting discussion that matters. I'm a big proponent of this notion. Often I'll quickly dismiss an idea I have because the discussion it created led to a much better one. However, my original idea was still crap. And saying in hindsight that I only offered it because of the discussion it would inevitably lead to is just... bad.
• derekp7 13y ago
  I don't really mind the personal data collection, except when the results are too obvious and exactly opposite of what I need. For example, after reading some articles on Social Security disability (and how some areas have as much as 25% of there population drawing it), I got curious and started doing some basic fact checking. Now, for the next several days, every web page I visit has a Binder & Binder ad on it. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have a hobby collecting and studying old slide rules -- including E6B "flight computer" circular slide rules. This included searching for, and reading up on the Breitling Navitimer watch, and similar watches. Well, now I get ads for various luxury watch brands (not interested in buying a luxury watch), along with Binder & Binder ads (not even close to disabled). I'm still not quite sure why this annoys me so much. I think it is the idea that someone is making a judgement on me / what I want, based on certain actions that had a completely different purpose. Probably similar to how urban photographers feel practicing their hobby, and getting harassed as potential terrorists or something. Yes, this is a minor thing to nit pick, and it isn't a major deal, just a bit unsettling at times.
  • tomkarlo 13y ago
    Folks in real life make judgements about you, and what you want, all the time in most cases it's entirely acceptable. Maybe it's disconcerting because online matches are often based on more tenuous information and less context. It can be ham-handed. As someone who has been harassed for urban photography, by law enforcement, I think that's a very different situation. Having someone in a position of authority mis-interpret innocent actions is a much more threatening thing than someone doing it for commercial reasons. A vendor can bug you but they're not going to detain you based on their guess that you might be interested in what they're selling. I raise this primarily because it seems like conflating an innocent mistake with overzealous / threatening law enforcement devalues the latter problem.
    • derekp7 13y ago
      Yes, it is on a different level -- that was just the first example that popped in mind (and I hesitated posting it, worrying that I could offend someone else). But you have the same problem with any analogy; there are always differences between the two items being compared. I think the problem for me is that I see it as a software bug, and since it is a bug that comes to light based on personal actions / data, it gets under my skin. Kind of like how Clippy got annoying back in the day. Or when Tivo makes inappropriate recommendations because you happened to watch a particular show (such as "My Tivo thinks I'm an 80-year-old retired grandmother").
• stevenbedrick 13y ago
  > Keyword search isn't good enough anymore Citation needed. I'd actually be quite satisfied if the current state of the art for general-purpose web IR stayed about where it is now- it's pretty dang good! I can't remember the last time I needed to find something using text search and was unable to. And when Google folks talk about making search "better", what they seem to generally be talking about these days is making it more "personalized", which strikes me as a questionable goal in terms of costs and benefits. Cost: living in an electronic panopticon the likes of which Orwell could never have envisioned, having my private information used as a raw material for somebody else's monetization strategy, etc. etc. Benefit: marginally better IR? Note that I'm not writing this as some sort of technophobic Luddite- I'm actually an academic researcher who works on IR problems. I guess it's just that I, as a potential end user, don't see enough value in hyper-personalized search to be worth the inevitable tradeoffs in terms of privacy and information centralization. Plus, I'm absolutely not anti-Google, or full of conspiracy theories, or anything like that- but I still find it more than a little creepy to think about just how much information they have about me. Just sayin', is all.
  • declan 13y ago
    Sometimes it's the technologists who are the most resistant to technological change. I sometimes get annoyed when Google displays results other than the 10 blue links, and tries to correct my searches when I'm searching for info on APIs, but I recognize that I'm in a minority and most people would benefit from more hand-holding. Put another way, you may be comfortable enough with computers to remember what directory your files are in, and handling backups manually, and all that. But my mother, despite decades of my attempts to the contrary, is not and never will be. And far more people are like her than me (and, I suspect, you). I think this is what Larry Page is in part talking about when he invokes the idea of the 1-percent-of-what-we-could-be-doing. Take a look at my colleague Sharon Vaknin's test of Google Now vs. Siri. They're both remarkably capable by the standards of even three years ago, but unlike Siri, Google understands context. "How tall is President Obama?" <answer> "By what margin was he reelected?" <answer> http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57584898-285/google-now-vs-siri-virtual-assistants-duke-it-out-video/ http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57584898-285/google-now-... I'm echoing what ender7 wrote above, I think, but you can't have a useful conversation with 10 blue links.
• vilaro 13y ago
  The mention about not having a centralized datacenter is interesting, so here are my two cents. A decentralized datacenter could be modeled after the open-source model. The data would not belong to any one single entity, but would be able to be accessed by interested parties via an API. (How to enforce which "third parties" get access to this data is another interesting question.) The algorithms for fast, efficient access and retrieval would then be improved upon by the open-source community so everyone could benefit. I like how search is becoming more contextual, but I don't feel comfortable when this data belongs to just one entity. My high school history teacher often used to say "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely", which is why I believe user data should somehow be decentralized. How to go about this is the million dollar question.
• ippisl 13y ago
  I think IBM watson is showing us that it's possible to build a great search engine with no privacy issues.
  • mortehu 13y ago
    I was unable to find a Watson based search engine using Google. Are you talking about the highly specialized application of asking Jeopardy questions? Recall that those searches are already constrained to being trivia, having exactly one solution and belonging to a certain Jeopardy category, context and difficulty.
• tmoertel 13y ago
  > Every argument is trivial to win if you first convert your opponent into Mecha-Hitler. The problem with this metaphor is that Mecha-Hitler's early studies were in rhetoric and formal logic, making him a skilled opponent in arguments of all kinds. It was only later, after the infamous radiation-and-remechanization incident during which his personality module was irreparably damaged, that his resulting monstrous disfigurements led people to believe him a simpleton, easily defeated in arguments. But I suspect that what people are concerned about regarding Google is whether it's best represented by the powerful and happy-go-lucky pre-incident Mecha-Hitler or by the powerful and scheming post-incident Mecha-Hitler. Without examining the personality module, how can you tell for sure?
• saurik 13y ago
  > Whether it's people writing polemic screeds about Glass despite knowing nothing about how the devices actually work (which they make up for by imagining a host of capabilities and features that it doesn't have).. So, obviously, that wasn't this article, as it didnt mention Glass (and if it did, it was a fanciful story anyway). Do you have such an example? (I ask, because I auite possibly haven't read enough articles, but the ones I've seen do not seem to make this mistake, even while I can easily imagine people making the opposite one of not taking into account that it is an open platform. As an example, the killer feature mentioned in the other big article this morning--taking a picture with a wink--is a real feature Google hid that didn't even need to be coded from scratch when Mike DiGiovanni released the hack to turn it on.) http://m.cnet.com/news/google-glass-code-lets-you-snap-a-photo-with-a-wink/57582500 http://m.cnet.com/news/google-glass-code-lets-you-snap-a-pho...
• pyre 13y ago
  | the Google of today The problem with concentrating power is that 'the Google of today' is not necessarily 'the Google of tomorrow.'
• gojomo 13y ago
  Thank you for disclosing your Google affiliation. Occasionally on HN, there are comments on Google-related topics that I suspect come from Google employees/affiliates, or waves of votes that may be coming from those with a financial attachment to Google. But often on social news/discussion sites, you don't know how closely the comments/votes are entangled with the issues being discussed.