Google revamps search engine to think like a person

SAN FRANCISCO: -- Google announced a major revamp of its web-domineering search engine Wednesday, just days after Microsoft'srival Bing service announced upgrades of its own.

Google’s new search powers are encapsulated in what the company calls a Knowledge Graph, in which the new algorithms attempt to understand exactly what people are looking for and present basicanswers on the results page, without users needing to click on any secondary links.

"We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what youwant," blogged Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president of engineering. "And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for." Using what Singhl called the "collective intelligence of the web,"the Knowledge Graph shows results for Tom Cruise, for example, that manage to answer 37 per cent of the next questions that people usually ask.

"This used to be the stuff of dreams because we didn’t really knowhow to accomplish it," Singhal said. "The dream has always been to understand things like you and I do, so this really feels like a seachange." The new information will be contained in a special panel next tothe traditional search results, Google said, and will be rolled out to users in the United States in the coming days before going international.

-- The Nation 2012-05-17

"Google revamps search engine to think like a person"

Ha. Which person? The twisted 'n sick? The conformist? The free thinker? ...

I know it's just a headline, but c'mon. It's silly to think that most of us are able to properly analyze our own needs and desires - let alone have computer software that presumes to pull up results that best suit us scatterbrained folk simply based on our cruising around for a Tom.

This person thinks they should not look at your location and feed everything in the local language. I keep getting messages saying translation failed, when I am looking at an English based website. For some reason this person (me) has a mind that can't be read. Not only a mind I might say. Apparently my e-mails confuse them as well, and so do my entries onto blogs other people have started that address the same issue.

Sometimes these geeks get just a little too smart for our good. Often it seems like the objective is to show off, rather than to meet needs.

Google is trying to do what Wolfram Alpha did years ago (and still does today, for that matter).

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

But Google has much better resources than Wolfram Alpha so I'm looking forward to this. I've already noticed it with some things, like birthdays or who stars in a movie, etc.

I just hope they don't configure it to think like my wife!!

This will be great fun to play with.