Google makes search 'more human'

16 May 2012 Last updated at 21:05 The Knowledge Graph groups results by context for the first time, Google said Google has revamped its search engine in an attempt to offer instant answers to search questions.

A new function, the Knowledge Graph, will make the site's algorithms act "more human", the site said in a blog post.

The feature will at first be available to US-based users, but will be rolled out globally in due course.

It follows similar efforts by rival Bing to provide added search content beyond the typical list of links.

Microsoft's search engine launched its "snapshot" column last week as part of a wider site redesign.

Google's senior vice president of engineering Amit Singhal explained that, until now, the search engine was only able match keywords, rather than understand context.

Mr Singhal said the words "Taj Mahal" could mean different things to different people.

"You might think of one of the world's most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant," he said.

Key information

Google said the Knowledge Graph has been programmed to use around 3.5 billion different attributes to organise results meaning it can now group results according to those various alternative interpretations.

For some searches, such as on prominent people, Google will automatically pull up a summary box with key information on that topic.

The next step, Mr Singhal said, is to look at how the site can answer more complex questions, such as "What are the 10 deepest lakes in Africa?"

In doing so the search engine would need to draw on multiple sources and factor in many different criteria.

This kind of computational, intelligent search is currently pioneered by the likes of Wolfram Alpha - a site which gathers verified data, such as from the World Health Organization, to provide statistical results.

It has long been a technological goal to produce search engines that could react entirely naturally to human-like queries.

One such effort includes the somewhat iconic search engine Ask Jeeves, where users can ask a stereotypically English butler for help.

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Google self-driving car crash caused by human

Jalopnik

As further evidence that we should welcome our robot overlords, it turns out the first self-driving car accident in robo history was caused by a human driver.

The competency of robo drivers came in to question over the weekend after Jalopnik posted a photo of a fender bender sent in by a tipster.

"This photo of what looks like a minor case of Prius-on-Prius vehicular violence may actually be a piece of automotive history," the automotive blog reported. Jalopnik identifed the collision-causing car in the photo — snapped near Google's Mountain View campus in California — by "the roof equipment that's smaller than a typical Google Streetview."

The historic moment passed quickly however, along with any opportunity for robot rebellion hysteria, when Google stated that the car was not in auto-mode at the time of the fender bender. "Safety is our top priority," Google told Business Insider. "One of our goals is to prevent fender-benders like this one, which occurred while a person was manually driving the car."

If only Google's self-driving cars came equipped with the "magical software" Google exec Vic Gundotra credits (in that one Mercedes commercial) with preventing a collision when he became distracted while driving his S63 AMG Sedan.

Indeed, the Google Prius damaged not one — but three — other cars in a chain reaction more confusing than Google+. One of the victims —a woman in a Honda Accord, described a "a huge screeching noise," to NBC Bay Area news, which delineated the accident:  "Google's Prius struck another Prius, which then struck her Honda Accord that her brother was driving. That Accord then struck another Honda Accord, and the second Accord hit a separate, non-Google-owned Prius."

No word yet on what caused the accident —beyond human error — but Google Spokesman Jay Nanacarrow pointed out to NBC Bay Area, that since Google's self-driving prototypes hit the road last year, "the cars have traveled 160,000 miles autonomously without incident."

This — and the fact that robot cars don't text — didn't stop the jokes at Jalopnik. "This is precisely why we're worried about self-driving cars," quipped the car blog. "Perhaps the complicated set of lasers and imaging systems that Google chief autonomous car researcher Sebastian Thrun called 'the perfect driving mechanism' thought it was just looking at its shadow."

More on Google robo-cars:

Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+. 

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X Games Ushers in Human Tweeting [VIDEO]

Ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, which is behind the Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign, introduced “Human Twitter” last week during the X Games on ESPN. The program worked like this: Viewers who tweeted using the hashtag #humantwitter had a chance to have their tweets spelled out on TV by 160 letter-holders. (Why 160 when Twitter famously limits tweets to 140 characters? To account for line breaks. The agency didn’t want to continue a word on the next line.)

The effort resulted in relevant tweets related to Travis Pastrana’s devastating injury and the X Games’ first-ever Moto X forward front flip by Jackson Strong. The program was a creative response to Twitter, which isn’t the most advertiser-friendly of mediums on first blush. However, Human Tweets wasn’t designed to promote anything in particular. A Wieden rep says it was meant to be a “fun, interactive event ESPN wanted to do that is meant to give fans a way to interact with the athletes at the X Games.”

[via Creativity Online]

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