AC2004: Peter Norwick Google. Web Search as a Force for Good

I came into the room and read on Peter Norwick's: Web Search as a Force for God

Scale of time saved through Google search: 5 minute * 200 million searches ~ 9.000 lifetimes per year saved.

Keyhole: You put in your current address and they zoom into it.

Japan Lovegety dating gadgets.

"In the future, search engines should be as useful as HAL in 2001 - just don't kill people." Sergey Brin.

Future: Spelling corrector. Google doesn't only have the correct words, but also statistics around it.

The power of a billion: After one million word training you get 85% after 10 millions even the worst algorithm is better then the best on.

Personalization after saving a profile you can decide how much the search results should take it into account.

Semantic Understanding: They parse the sentence and look for the name "including" for things like "software companies including Oracle, SAP, ..."

Machine Translation: As a learning ground they are using European documents, because they are available in translated form. 

Q: You wrote books about AI, at the moment it is mostly brute force.
A: Google uses the approach of spending most of the time on the easy stuff. One day we will go back to solve the hard problems.

Somehow not a lot of new things, but the first time that I liveblogged.