To Search Smarter, Find a Person? 136
Svonkie writes "Brendan Koerner reports in Wired Magazine that a growing number of ventures are using people, rather than algorithms, to filter the Internet's wealth of information. These ventures have a common goal: to enhance the Web with the kind of critical thinking that's alien to software but that comes naturally to humans. 'The vogue for human curation reflects the growing frustration Net users have with the limits of algorithms. Unhelpful detritus often clutters search results, thanks to online publishers who have learned how to game the system.'"
Will Google... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:But isn't AI and metadata just around the corne (Score:3, Insightful)
If I can guarantee anything I can guarantee that someone or some artificial intelligence will find a way to game any new system, no matter how sophisticated it is.
ref. Spy vs. Spy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_vs._Spy [wikipedia.org]
As far as human editors go, Wikipedia seems to strike the right b
Re:But isn't AI and metadata just around the corne (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, it's a basic theorem that given sufficient time, human-level intelligence can always beat any system with less than human-level intelligence (aside from trivial cases like a complete firewall). This is because the human's theory of mind can fully encompass the lesser system (so you can understand how it works), while the reverse is not true. Computers can only beat humans at chess when the match is played with a time control.
This doesn't mean that a computer system can never be good enough to solve this problem. However, it does mean that if you could build a computer system that could solve it, then it would insist on being paid.
It also doesn't mean that using human-level intelligence will always solve this problem. Humans can still be beaten, they just start on a level playing field. Hence it's pretty much inevitable that some people will still find ways to game the system.
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Of course that all breaks down when there is a misunderstanding, how ever goodwill and good manners will generally resolve this. Now trying to create programs to mimic this, is a sure recipe for GIGO, garbage in, garbage out, a whole lot of frustrated people and
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Yes. And it's been "just around the corner" since the 1970s (along with battery-powered cars and flying cars). There's a difference between predicting something will happen, and when it will happen. So far the task has proved itself far more difficult than people originally thought (which is why A.I. was predicted to happen in 1980 - and yet still had not happened).
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Sure, but we're the product of billions of years of evolution. What makes you think that we'll be able to replicate or even approximate the human thought process any time soon? Hell, we're having problems even getting computers/machines to w
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Hell, we're having problems even getting computers/machines to work out simple things like moving limbs without falling over, or reacting in order to avoid being hit by an object, but you think we're going to be able to teach them to use higher-order brain functions?
Not to disagree with your entire point, but why should we assume walking without falling is easier than higher-order brain functions? "Hard for a human" isn't the same as "hard to develop/evolve". Human intelligence happened largely in the last 10 million years, which on an evolutionary scale is insignificant. Brain systems like the visual cortex and the motor cortex have been evolving for much longer to get where they are.
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It's certainly possible that self awareness and "intelligence" were easy for evolution to tack-on once the rest of the structure was there. But it's also silly to assume that we can create intelligence and self awareness WITHOUT the rest of the structure.
As ahabswhale [slashdot.org] already pointed out, "your perception defines your reality". The first step of teaching computers to th
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It's certainly possible that self awareness and "intelligence" were easy for evolution to tack-on once the rest of the structure was there. But it's also silly to assume that we can create intelligence and self awareness WITHOUT the rest of the structure.
I agree; It wasn't clear in my post perhaps, but I come from the school of thought that a great deal of "intelligence" actually comes from the periphery. As humans we take our sensory and motor systems for granted because they "just work" (and we like to emphasize our differences from other animals). However when you study the brain, parts like such as the visual system are a *lot* more tuned than some of the more recent developments. That means it might be harder to develop. Of course that's not to sa
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It could be fun to set up some "Minsky Awards" for AI's that manage to destroy themselves, to match the Darwin Awards at http://www.darwinawards.com/ [darwinawards.com].
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Cool. Sorry, I'm just getting tired of people predicting breakthroughs around every corner.
You're right, and I was thinking of this as I was hitting the "submit" button - the problems with roboti
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No, they're based on the underlying logic. Your statement, on the other hand, is based on failing to specify what "learn" means, and hence avoiding thinking about the subject, combined with not even bothering to read the post to which you are replying.
When you have two given systems A and B, then the following statement is either true or false:
System A is able to understand how sy
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And frankly, there's nothing "open" about the Church-Turing state of humans. We're far too error prone to even approach a good computer's ability, we forget too easily, and our fundamental neurology is not binary. It's a dynamic 3-D analog network, and the neurons are not digital. They're impuse transceivers, not wel
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And by the way, it's not the tortilla that gives you wind. The tortilla is just a flat soft bread, used to wrap up food or grab food with, lots of cultures make versions of them. It's the cheese and beans you put in the tortilla to make a burrito, just as a bit more thoug
just around the corner (Score:3, Interesting)
Expect to lose your job soon after the paperless office arrives. It's always just around the corner but something human gets in the way every time. AI will be much the same.
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Yes it is (Score:1)
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Paid search is always going to be a niche business, because most people don't want to pay, and because it doesn't scale as well as algorithmic search. But for those who want to use paid search (such as Uclue), it's a valuable service.
Old news (Score:2)
Re:Old news (Score:4, Funny)
Re:But isn't AI and metadata just around the corne (Score:2)
If you want to wait for AI go ahead. It's much like waiting for cheap fusion power though. I'm sure it will happen someday, but I'm not holding my breath.
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The problem with this is that people would freak out over the privacy implications well before Google had enough contextual information to answer queries like this. :-(
Algorithms are written by people (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless we are talking about Skynet.
Generation Gap (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I know we should start a business around that idea... Oh wait...
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Age has a lot less to do with it than intelligence. I'm 36, and I live with two college students who are 23, and I can tell you that they don't know a gosh darned thing about computers. They're clueless when it comes to effective searching, they don't know how to avoid viruses, and they don't know their way around their own computers.
The problem with patting yourself on the back for being young
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Oooh, I know... getoffmymyspace!
Well, it's also a problem of expertise (Score:2)
1. Let's say I'm interested in legal advice, for example. I know how to use Google, but (A) it will take me disproportionately more time to understand it than it would take a lawyer, and (B) I'm still not sure if I understood it right, or if the person who wrote that does. Sometimes Google isn't the Alpha and the Omega. Sometimes I'd rather pay a lawyer to search for me, than trust my l33t operator-combining
Critical thinking comes naturally? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I always thought that the pure intuitiveness of a search engine such as Google should be the simplest thing in the world. You want to find something, search for "something". Unfortunately I was very wrong and I come across more people every day who can't understand how to locate auto parts or cooking recopies on line to save their lives. The same people who will forward inane emails and play pop cap games all day long.
How is the simple task of knowing what words to use in a search so difficul
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Yeah, I've stopped believing in the possibility of natural intelligence, myself.
Craziness (Score:2)
Surely you jest...
Really? (Score:2)
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If so, that would seem like a decent reason to be looking for a new job...
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My boss has his own brand of that.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
There has to be some kind of intelligent filtering. If it's not done for me, it's done by me, when I choose which result to click. The biggest problem with paying someone to do that sorting for you is the simple fact that it's too expensive. Yahoo might have stayed a human-sorted list forever, except that it would have taken an army of "surfers" to do it. The web just got too big to be done that way all the time.
Google results used to be a lot more relevant than they are now. Far too often, I'm interested in X, and search for "X" on Google, I find millions of people who want to sell me X. But I'm not even sure if I want to buy it. I'm looking for information about X. That is getting harder and harder to find. The quote in the summary is correct - people have learned how to "game" the system.
How often do you "google" something, and then just go to the Wikipedia link? I do all the time. That way, I can be sure to get actual information about the subject, rather than a link to its Amazon page. In many ways, because of the search engine optimizers, Wikipedia is already replacing Google as the default source of information.
New Ingenious Filtering System! (Score:5, Interesting)
Tag article "activelyavoid" and move along.
Interestingly enough, this whole thing sounds like an idea Rob Malda thought up about 10 years ago, except Brijit lacks a discussion and moderation system where experts and opinionated thinkers can vie to share their collective wisdom to enhance the content of the original article.
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That about nails it. The restricted input sounds more like an encyclopedia, so it's more regressive than most people would first imagine.
Why would they bother to list "actively avoid" articles and who would trust a tiny third party to censor their news like that?
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Everything Old is New Again (Score:5, Insightful)
In the absence of the mythical, impossible strong-AI, there will always be an important role for experts -- you know, thinking meat, sitting there pushing charges through neurons, having opinions about stuff -- and those experts will probably use a lot of mechanized search tools to improve the breadth of their knowledge, their awareness of knowledge, and the accessibility of information. Technology and people work together!
But you're an idiot if you take out the wetware-based BS filter.
It's coordinating all that expert opinion, and filtering out the drivel, that poses the great organizational challenge of our collective information future. Wiki-based approaches are a good first step; maybe a "trusted-wiki" like Citizendium [citizendium.org] will be the next step; it's definitely going to keep evolving. But it's long been recognized by the reasonable that if you want an informed opinion, rather than a pattern match, you ask the librarian. We've known that since Alexandria -- nay, Ur -- and it's a shame we keep forgetting.
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I don't trust anything that hard to pronounce.
notreallynews (Score:1)
Finally (Score:5, Funny)
How does bias play into the equation? (Score:1)
Like the original Yahoo (Score:4, Insightful)
In circles we evolve (Score:1)
Economics, Wisdom of Crowds, and Experts (Score:5, Insightful)
A somewhat more interesting thing, in my opinion, is all the "wisdom of crowds" stuff we see so much hype about. It's interesting because it works very well in certain cases - basically the case where the popular thing is the right thing. The main problem with this is that any search engine that shows you 10 results and then counts which ones you click, well, it's not getting your input on result #11, or 23, etc. So before anyone votes, items that happen to be near the top almost certainly stay at the top. Many good items that the algorithm ranked medium might never get voted on!
One way around this is to randomly select some less good results, so that viewers get a chance to vote for the underdogs and bring them to the top of the pile. But this pollutes results for each user, essentially making them pay a "moderation tax" by requiring them to see things that the algorithm has no reason to believe are better results.
All-in-all, social information finding features seem to be much better suited for finding things you didn't even *know* you wanted - StumbleUpon being a great example of a tool for doing that. I would imagine that this could be very useful even in the corporate sector, as many business strategies and engineering techniques have variants or cousins that are similar in function, but may be more obscure. Having the ability to see that "people who searched for X ended up wanting to know about Y too" might save me a lot of time...
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if they maintained a pool of trained searchers that could be called upon for difficult queries (paid at maybe a fourth the rate of salaried employees).
This is, BTW, the perfect job for all the stoner geeks out there. It's simple, requires minimal effort, yet it's (apparently) not something the average person can do.
Just one of the many interesting societal changes that the Internet may cause. It's not hard to imagine (in 10-20 years) "'net searcher" being an actual profession...
[/post-apocalyptic sci-fi geek rambling]
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I didn't always find them that helpful though. A lot of times they weren't able to pick out or find what I wanted, unless I told them exactly what journal and exactly what
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Also, the librarians do have good educations and are very intelligent people, however they are not subject matter experts. If I tell them I need, say, a set of wavelet basis functions that are orthonormal, efficient to compute,
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a pool of trained searchers that could be called upon for difficult queries (paid at maybe a fourth the rate of salaried employees). I know that I've had searches for work that took most of a day just to find that one formula I needed from 30 years worth of journal papers.
(emphasis added) That's the problem right there. The really difficult searches require very specific domain knowledge. I've also spent days searching for some specific bit of information. But I doubt that anyone else would have recognized the bit of information when they came across it, unless they also had the training and domain knowledge that I have. Also, searching is itself a learning process:
1. While searching, you pick up tangential tid-bits of knowledge that are related to what you're trying to fi
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if they maintained a pool of trained searchers that could be called upon for difficult queries (paid at maybe a fourth the rate of salaried employees).
That's not as unorthodox an idea as it might sound. Lots of professionals have always had assistants whose specific purpose was to research, proofread, fact-check, etc. Doing internet research is now just another skill for those types of assistants.
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I'm sorry, I wasn't clear in my original post. What I meant to say was, whatever classification algorithm you use (voting, Bayesian inference, etc etc), ite
Wow! (Score:2)
Kudos to the guy who started the service, but the "insight" that a human can find and summarize relevant information better than a computer is hardly a surprise.
I mean, librarians and executive assistants and the like have been doing this kind of stuff for a very long time. Retrieval relevancy is a huge problem -- especially when you're talking about something as humungous as the internet. There's so much crap out there, it's likely always going require a human to do good executive summar
Movie "Desk Set" predicted this long ago (Score:1)
Very fun, charming little movie, all about the perils of automation. Check it out, even if you have to use up your next Netflix delivery. Worth, if for nothing else than seeing Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn onscreen again. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050307/ [imdb.com]
Lesser Of Two Evils (Score:2)
Back to Yahoo! model (Score:2)
Google: magical search algorithm organizes content, gets it right sometimes.
We're back to the Yahoo! model because people have figured out how to game the system, namely Google, without adding content that's important to the searcher.
I welcome this. Our computers can't yet come close to matching our brainpower.
It's not that hard to get rid of the crap (Score:5, Interesting)
We're back to the Yahoo! model because people have figured out how to game the system, namely Google, without adding content that's important to the searcher.
It's not hard to throw out most of the bottom-feeders. [sitetruth.com] We do it. The crowd at Search Engine Watch (which, despite the name, is all about advertising, not search quality) is writing me angry messages for doing that. Now that we've demonstrated that 36% of Google AdSense advertisers are bottom-feeders, they know they're being watched. Some feel they're being targeted.
Bear in mind that most search requests are really, really dumb. [google.com] That's what Google has to answer. In fact, most Google search requests don't hit the search engine at all; there's a cache of common queries and answers in all the front end machines, and a sizable fraction of requests are answered from cache.
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I followed your link and... holy crap!
Most of them are World of Warcraft searches!
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Ah, instant gratification. The system rates on demand, then caches for 30 days. So the first user to query a new site has to wait. On the other hand, any new site can be rated immediately; there's no wait for a crawler to get to it. Linksys is now rated, and it now moves up in the rankings. And Wikipedia is listed as non-commercial; it's in ".org", there's no conflicting info from Open Directory, and it doesn't have ads.
Besides, the "alternate operating system" thing for the WRT45G never worked very we
Lack of machine intuition is a feature, not a bug (Score:3)
But what if the system being "gamed" is a human-based search engine? Since the publisher must fool humans anyway, the "unhelpful detritus" in the end users' results will blend in. Even if there are fewer false positives, those that remain will be harder to eliminate.
Interesting, it makes some sense (Score:2)
Can that decision tree b
Webrings writ large (Score:3, Interesting)
While I have not RTFA (this is Slashdot, after all), the summary makes it sound like the combination of Webrings and "Top X" lists, both of which are used much less now and don't carry as much weight but still require user interaction on a grand scale.
I'd be interested to see how this kind of search engine turns out- however, you also have the problem of "majority think", so searching for, say, evolution might have a first result for a page "debunking" it. But then I browse at +4, so I shouldn't complain.
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For those that never partook; a webring is a loose collection of related websites, at least half of which no longer exist, are premantently "Under construction" or appe
People? (Score:1)
Nothing new here; move along (Score:1)
What distanced Google over purely statistical keyword search engines like Altavista was actually the use the human ranking implicit in the human-created URL links between pages[1]: the application of citation analysis[2] to the web.
Oooh, look, it's been invented again! Hooray!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank [wikipedia.org]
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_analysis [wikipedia.org]
Either you pay the editors, or it's crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikia shows the problem with this approach. Coverage of Star [Wars|Trek|Gate|Craft] is extensive. Coverage of, say, bank regulation is nonexistent. If you want to find out how we got into the subprime mortgage mess or what to do about it, Wikia search is totally useless. That's what you get from volunteer editors. Wikipedia does better, but most of the good contributions were made years ago.
Today, you pay the editors, or you get fancruft.
It's amusing that the author of the article feels overwhelmed by The Economist. That's a very well written magazine with good reporters; they had the only reporter in Lhasa when the Chinese clamped down, and they have a good analysis this week of the issues surrounding derivatives. If this guy can't handle The Economist, his organization's answers will probably be dumbed down to the level of, say, "People". That level of crap one can get for free, from many existing sources.
Remember Google Answers? Nobody really cared, and Google shut it down.
There's a whole industry of expensive, small-circulation specialist newsletters, but those are niche operations run by specialists in narrow fields.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis [wikipedia.org]
LetterRip
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And might I add that they are also being continuously undermined by hordes of editors that THINK they know what they are talking about, but in fact are introducing misinformation.
It seems like the large numbers of dedicated editors have disappeared, and the Wikipedia model is starting to break down. Mature articles get more vandalism and misinformation than good edits, but the wiki model is not geared to handle such things, and t
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Several dozen former Google Answers Researchers started up Uclue [uclue.com], where we're carrying on in the Google Answers tradition of paid Q&A/research.
Group search works (Score:2)
People already know this (Score:2, Informative)
1. is that most people hate looking for things
2. is that most people are lousy at looking for stuff on the web.
Our solution, of course, is that we have institutions full of peopl
Could be useful (Score:2)
Seriously how far off is that? We're not talking about the singularity though it would have to be pretty close to the turing test. Ask the search engine a question, not quite what you want? Ask to narrow it down, if you cleverly crossreference the results with the narrowing question it should be fairly feasible to do comparably as well as talking to a live person who knows how to search. I'm not sure I'd want to build, o
Typo there in the summary (Score:2)
Hope this helps.
Congratulations! You've invented Slashdot! (Score:2)
Skim the summaries, and occasionally there's something worth clicking through. It's not a new idea at all.
It also seems like a bad idea, if it's based on this premise:
And it's much [slashdot.org] easier [wikipedia.org] to game human systems than algorithmic ones, I expect.
Applicable (Score:3, Insightful)
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
--T.S. Eliot
Wow, perhaps it's just me, but.... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not really difficult, many of those sufferers know how to use a library, which is the real world equivalent of searching on the Internet. (not that the Internet is not real world) Most people were taught how to use a library in their school days and that usage has not changed much with time. The usage of Internet searching does change, and there are multiple ways of doing it. People who are not interested in learning new ways will always just say it is too difficult.
Using boolean modifiers or advanced search is always there, people just don't use it. They also don't fix their own lawnmowers or other things. They just replace them or pay someone else to do the 'hard' stuff. There is enough information on the Internet to allow anyone to learn to protect their home computer from infections and malware, yet it still is a problem.
The human problem of search engines will NOT go away, it can only be made to look less with smarter UIs. A tag cloud system of bookmarking could be used to refine search results but would not work in all cases. The URL history with timestamps might help, but not in all cases. Analysis of search results and those pages actually visited might help narrow the criteria to personal bias but not in all cases. That is why the operator has to be smart enough to know what they want and don't. The Internet does not come with your very own personal cruise director to make sure all goes well. People just believe that it is supposed to be easy because they want to do the cool things that they hear about on television and from their friends etc.
Perhaps one day the interface will be fast enough to be considered good when our brains can be plugged into the computer itself, something like The Matrix, reducing click delays and reading to milliseconds. Until then, teaching people how to use complex search strings will help reduce the angst and pain.
"cars +toyota -hummer 2005" aobut 2.98M hits
is better than
"cars 2005" about 19 million hits
but you have to teach people that those extra characters really REALLY do help.
If people don't know how to use a soldering gun, please don't give them one... or something like that. Oh yeah, car analogy: you apparently can't drive on the streets of the USA legally without a license, which you cannot obtain without demonstrating proficient control of the vehicle.
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>>own vehicles much more so than today. The onboard computer stopped
>>a lot of that, and general complexity stopped more.
I wonder if that was caused more by the generation gap than anything else. You'll notice that the onboard diagnostic computers were becoming widespread about the time the Me gen and Gen X were beginning to drive. The new paradigm affects everyone, of course, but the old-timers still retain at least part
...click "OK" to continue... (Score:2)
Or maybe just shoot those "keyword squatters"? (Score:2)
One Problem Is... (Score:2)
Yahoo! (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess I've been wrong... (Score:2)
All kidding aside.. I've found an increasing number of people who seem to think I'm their human google proxy. When someone asks me a question that I can cut and paste into google and get 10,000+ results, the first dozen plus pages all clearly describing the issue and usually fixes, I get pissed. Of course these
Google completely relies on human judgment (Score:2)
The article is misleading: Google's rankings are based entirely on human evaluation. The signals Google uses -- like the number and origin of incoming links to a page, or the specific title and headings the author uses to summarize their content -- are entirely the work of humans trying to make their content useful to readers. Google's algorithms in effect just aggregate this human-created information into a convenient form. (True "algorithmic" search that doesn't use human-generated signals is the prob
As my highschool CS teacher said... (Score:2)