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I'm a bit confused by this article because Google can't actually answer the complex questions that the librarians have received. Google's "knowledge graph" can

I'm a bit confused by this article because Google can't actually answer the complex questions that the librarians have received. Google's "knowledge graph" can answer simple questions, based on scraped Wikipedia data, and the core part of the site (the search engine) presents users with a semi-random set of links, basically telling them to find the answer on someone else's site. It's like a librarian that knows a little bit of info (but not quite enough) who then tells you which part of the library to go to find a book that may or many not have the answer to your question. A site like Quora is better for answering complex questions. IMHO, the "knowledge graph" actually shows that Google is very poor at determining the implied questions people are asking, and exposed the failures of alogorithmic search in general: http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/ http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/

jyrkesh 12y ago
The article doesn't even mention the Knowledge Graph. It's using just referring to the fact that Google is still the first place you go to ask those questions. Usually, the answer resides somewhere in the first page of results. I asked Google "will a poisonous snake die if it bites itself?" Results include Quora, Yahoo Answers, a Youtube video of a snake actually doing it, and HowStuffWorks. So no "Google" doesn't know, but I'm going to ask Google when I want to answer a question.
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  >Usually, the answer resides somewhere in the first page of results. And that's the business opportunity.
xyzzyz 12y ago
I guess the point of the article is that now you find answers to these questions _using_ Google, and not necessarily get answers from Google itself. Also, while Google Knowledge Graph cannot answer complex questions given as examples in the article, until quite recently it couldn't even answer simple questions it is able to answer now. I wonder how long will it take until it is able to answer the questions from the article.
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  I think Google can't answer complex queries because it cannot understand the question, because the answers to the questions are generally created by humans, and are not easily scraped from other sites. So it seems likely that Google will buy Quora, or make an equivalent.
  - bhaumik 12y ago
    I'd attempt to acquire/"make" a Wolfram clone before looking into Quora. http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/ http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/
minthd 12y ago
While quora sometimes gives good answers, often you get no answers at all. And don't forget the time issue - quora is quite slow.
7952 12y ago
I am skeptical about the entire premise of software like Google answering questions more complicated than research for school reports. Any sufficiently interesting question can be answered better by humans. Questions with simple answers often require more nuance to properly understand the answer. For example if you ask the population of a city. When was the census, and how exactly was the edge of the city defined? To make information usable you need to understand the source. Complex questions have multiple sources that may be incomaptible in forming an answer to a question. Without strict standards for representing knowledge I doubt Google have sufficient data to do anything groundbreaking outside of a few small areas.

jyrkesh 12y ago

The article doesn't even mention the Knowledge Graph. It's using just referring to the fact that Google is still the first place you go to ask those questions. Usually, the answer resides somewhere in the first page of results. I asked Google "will a poisonous snake die if it bites itself?" Results include Quora, Yahoo Answers, a Youtube video of a snake actually doing it, and HowStuffWorks. So no "Google" doesn't know, but I'm going to ask Google when I want to answer a question.

sparkzilla 12y ago
>Usually, the answer resides somewhere in the first page of results. And that's the business opportunity.

xyzzyz 12y ago

I guess the point of the article is that now you find answers to these questions _using_ Google, and not necessarily get answers from Google itself. Also, while Google Knowledge Graph cannot answer complex questions given as examples in the article, until quite recently it couldn't even answer simple questions it is able to answer now. I wonder how long will it take until it is able to answer the questions from the article.

sparkzilla 12y ago
I think Google can't answer complex queries because it cannot understand the question, because the answers to the questions are generally created by humans, and are not easily scraped from other sites. So it seems likely that Google will buy Quora, or make an equivalent.
- bhaumik 12y ago
  I'd attempt to acquire/"make" a Wolfram clone before looking into Quora. http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/ http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/

minthd 12y ago

While quora sometimes gives good answers, often you get no answers at all. And don't forget the time issue - quora is quite slow.

7952 12y ago

I am skeptical about the entire premise of software like Google answering questions more complicated than research for school reports. Any sufficiently interesting question can be answered better by humans. Questions with simple answers often require more nuance to properly understand the answer. For example if you ask the population of a city. When was the census, and how exactly was the edge of the city defined? To make information usable you need to understand the source. Complex questions have multiple sources that may be incomaptible in forming an answer to a question. Without strict standards for representing knowledge I doubt Google have sufficient data to do anything groundbreaking outside of a few small areas.