Google Think

[brettw]

So I've been thinking about Google: what it does, how it does it, and limitations of their approach. One question that is quite intriguing to me is the following scenario:

Suppose a user gives Google some information (eg search terms, a file). If Google was allowed to take some time (a minute, an hour, a day even), what sort of services could it

Comments

[thefunkychook]

I guess what you'd need to do is find an NP-or-greater-complexity problem, select a problem size for which it's not feasible to precalculate and store all the answers, and then say "Google: what's the shortest path which goes through all 11 billion of these cities??".

But I guess that wouldn't be all that interesting? Maybe another question to consider is "What interesting and useful 'in character' services could google provide if it were given a much longer time?" ??

(not sure if this makes sense; brain's not working too well atm!)

[brettw]

Yeah, that's the intention of what I wanted.

I guess as another opportunity for them to achieve this "goal" they'd apply some hardcore AI and broaden the concept of "searching" or data mining.

Maybe it needs brilliant ideas. Searching billions of documents in under a tenth of a second several years ago would have seemed ridiculous. Now it's a baseline assumption.

Searches taking a while to complete isn't such a revolutionary ideas, but I guess it's more the questions coming from it: what useful thing needs a significant jump up in technology to distinguish itself from what is done nowadays? What, indeed, is a really hard (but day-to-day useful) problem?

[bifurcati]

I was wondering about something which D kind of touched on - perhaps you could get it to do sort of literature searches for me, after a fashion. For instance, as a silly example, maybe I could tell it to "Find me the link between cats and dogs", for which it would come up with "pets", having found many pages that link both cats and dogs. That's probably easy/quick.

But perhaps I could ask more complex questions, like "What is the link between John Howard and the price of diamonds?" Could it search through web pages, news stories, etc, and come up with some sort of top list of the effect John Howard might have? Perhaps it's through the effects of Australian exports on South Africa. Or maybe it's from voting against gay marriage which would have resulted in more rings being sold. Or whatever.

Interesting idea, anyway. Google's doing a talk in Brisbane next week - maybe I'll ask them ;)