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So .. Google have these data. Their hacking chops are not unremarkable. What have they done with it? Well, basically, you can ask for a word and they'll find
by caffeine 17y ago
So .. Google have these data. Their hacking chops are not unremarkable. What have they done with it? Well, basically, you can ask for a word and they'll find other pages that feature that word ...
And that's it.
They have access to "the world's combined knowledge" and a zillion PhDs, and that's all they can do?! It's shocking. But it's not, really, because the data are basically useless without annotations.
So let's go to Disneyland and pretend we have a genius NLP engine or an annotated web. Then,
1) 360 on a company/product. In particular: who are all the stakeholders, and how do they feel? I'd sell this to e.g. analysts. Same thing on people's online identities.
2) Memetracing. I'd sell this to advertisers. (So, we follow historical product releases and see exactly what memes spread about them and how, and through who. Related to (3) on ismarc's post)
3) Rumors (this would require your feed to be real-time). I'd also probably sell this to stock traders (the idea here is to monitor e.g. forums frequented by GE employees to guess scoop)
OK, so those are basic. More interesting:
4) Organization-tracing. If you can label social graph edges with influence levels / information intakes, you can start playing with predicting organizational decision-making (behavioral economics / game theory ..There's a TED talk about this).
5) Games: procedural content generation that looks really real, i.e. worlds full of people whose identities are plausible, whose interactions with others are plausible, etc.
Those all require some analytical / NLP firepower on a scale which I don't think is really doable at the moment. The problem is that bags of words are meaningless without a social context - the data are pretty worthless unless your computer can figure out who it's important for and why.
- nostrademons 17y ago"So .. Google have these data. Their hacking chops are not unremarkable. What have they done with it? Well, basically, you can ask for a word and they'll find other pages that feature that word ..." There's actually a lot more that's done with it. Google Flu Trends. Google Zeitgeist. Google Squared. Google Suggest. Refinements. Spelling suggestions. Sitelinks. Wonder Wheel. Everything on Labs. The limiting factor is more the ability to present the data to users without making them confused. It's pretty easy to run an analysis and get some data, but pretty difficult to figure "Okay, what problem does this solve?" and get that data in front of users in a way that actually solves the problem.
- timcederman 17y agoIf you really think that's all they're doing then you have very little understanding in just how subtly awesome some of the stuff they're doing is. Peter Norvig does a better job explaining some of it than I ever could. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4
- caffeine 17y agoPeter Norvig says exactly what I said in that video. He says it when he says "... but the computer doesn't understand physics." Why not? The internet knows a hell of a lot more physics than I do. The statistical stuff is cool, but all you can do with it is fancy accounting. You can never really pull out meaning .. and doing real analogical / inductive reasoning on statistical data sets is hard. You'll notice that suggestion (4) can only be considered doable because the internet has easily accessible APIs to determine who is real and what organizations they belong to. While suggestion (5) is not feasible at all at the moment.