Tuesday, 08 May - 18:04 Category: Commentry

How to Improve Google Pt 2

SYNOPSIS: Just get Google to understand the meaning of what we’re searching for and then help us focus our thinking, thus, improving the results.  This article is topped with my usual philosophical nonsense. 

You've probably heard of the Turin test in which in order to prove artificial intelligence a computer must conduct a conversation with a human without the person knowing it's a computer.

This test annoys me.  Just because you can fool someone into believing they’re having a conversation with a human doesn't mean you've cracked artificial intelligence it just means you've been able to fool someone irrespective of how stringent the criteria may be.  A few years ago when synthesisers began replicating real instruments all the pundits said  that pretty soon electronics would produce "exactly" the same sound as a real piano.  In fact, this is utter drivel because if you replicate the sound of a piano absolutely exactly you have created a piano.  You simply can't exactly recreate the sound any other way.

In many ways the search for artificial intelligence is, therefore, the search to recreate the brain because the only way for a computer to talk to a human being as a human being is to be a human being! 

Perhaps our efforts are better placed in technology coming to a better understanding of how we communicate rather than trying to emulate our communication.  This is my next challenge for Google! 

All I want you guys to do is to produce a search (and this is really easy) which understands semantically and through synonyms what I'm searching for.  For example, let's say I type in 

“I’m looking for how much money was made by UK companies this year”

Wouldn't it be wonderful if Google could firstly ask me... 

“Do you mean profits, turnover or share price?” 

And then return the websites with the answer (ideally highlighted). 

Or how about... 

“What is the cheapest price for a Sony PlayStation 3?” 

Google asks: "Do you want that to include delivery, be in-stock right now, be a walk in shop in your area?” 

All Google is doing is producing results based on the results of other websites so it is perfectly situated to help humans focus their thinking and ‘narrow-cast’ the results.  In fact the resultant questions don’t need to be predetermined they should be deduced from browsing behaviour. 

The idea here is that the system demonstrates some 'intelligence' about what I'm asking for.  (And this is where I directly follow on from my original blog article on How to Improve Google.) 

At one level Google wishes to step into the field of encyclopaedic knowledge.  You can see them making headway in this arena with their "scholar" and Books Search programs.  Once you agglomerate all that information and understand its context you have the foundation stones for artificial intelligence on a grand scale.

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Posted By:Jed Wylie on Thu, May 8th 2008, 18:04