[Sigia-l] Microsoft's Google-killer arrives with a 'whuh?'

[Alexander Johannesen]

Hi,

> for all the stuff I dump on Google, I still use it myself. Life before
> Google for me was a lot slower - going to Altavista or Yahoo and hoping
> for the best. I can't imagine going back to their awkwardness. One-way
> hierarchical categorisation schemes? Bleauh! :)

Well, as a primordeal soup I guess it worked out alright ... but the
trouble is that we're still very much in it; we haven't been able to
properly climb out of our little pond, even if we've got the knowledge
and have a red line thrown at us to help us climb out. It's like our
arms are ... uh, not there.

I keep thinking that the stuff I found in the old days were good, but
perhaps reality is that now I find better stuff but at the same time
tons more of the bad stuff. Hmm.

> What is your alternative? Will there be Life
> After Microsoft for the rest of us? :)

Well, Microsoft may want to (and may end up doing it) swallow Googles
juice. Hopefully Google is one step ahead with ... something. I work
with all sorts of Topic Maps and semWeb related stuff myself which is
marginally "better", but perhaps for different reasons. Some search
engines do a bit of both Google and SemWeb stuff. And yet again ...
it's all pretty nasty and crude attempts at getting good results.

Alternative? Change the underlying understanding of epistomology.
Well, I should really say "update people to modern epistomology".
Crikey, Lakoffs "Women, fire and dangerous things" was written back in
1991, and we're still fiddling around with our class hierchial stuff.
The SemWeb is even based on it. *grumble*

Anyways, alternatives to what we're doing is of course to look into
prototypical properties of words, phrases and resources, work out the
context, and deliver search results based on that. We're getting
there, ever so slowly. Google got the context thing going, which
really was at the core of their success. There will be more such
little breakthroughs in knowledge representation, albeit Microsoft
hasn't introduced any such thing. Yet.

I'm not worried, though; this is a multi-billion industry. I'm sure
someone far smarter than me is working on it.


Alexander
-- 
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
                                                         - Frank Herbert
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