More on Google …
I posted about Google a couple of weeks ago (or months ago?) and expressed how impressed I am by this company. This is another post to expand on my thoughts about why I consider them so amazing.
There are a number of organizations across the planet that are all exploring ‘artificial intelligence’ and the creation of ‘thinking machines.’ I often believe that people miss the point when they see these being created within a single computer, or even having some sort of human form or appearance. In my opinion, it will be massive clusters/networks of machines that will give birth to ‘artificial intelligence.’ All of this will occur – IMHO – just as the brain works … through the accumulation and abstraction of huge volumes of ‘sensory’ data, combined with powerful pattern matching.
So this is where Google steps in. Google’s architecture is one that is massively distributed, and contains evolving pattern matching capabilities. Google is constantly ‘crawling’ or ‘spidering’ the Internet web sites gathering massive amounts of raw data, human knowledge, and anything else it can find. All of this data is then stored (cached), ranked, and indexed. When you go to Google and make a query, they use some very sophisticated pattern matching to return the results.
To get an idea of the types of pattern matching that are emerging from Google’s data, go take a look at their Google Sets. To see what this is capable of, enter three or four names of small towns near where you were born … click Small or Large sets and see what you get. It’s pretty cool.
So how does Google get even better? Well, one way would be to have humans type information and knowledge into Google so that it doesn’t have to go crawling and hunting for it. How would you do that? First, have it subscribe to all of the news groups that are used by millions(?) of Internet users. All of their posts would then flow into the databases of Google. Second, purchase a “Web Logging”, or ‘blogging’ company and offer the service for free. Users of the service would then be typing their thoughts, ideas, and knowledge directly into the Google databases.
And that is exactly what Google has done. Buying DejaNews gave them the NNTP news feeds and the first capability. Buying Blogger gave them the second capability. Google now has millions(?) of Internet users filling their databases with vast amounts of human knowledge. For free! This article seems impressed that Google purchased Blogger, and then chose to ‘give the product away for free.’ What else would they do? There is nothing like being able to ’employ’ people for your business and not have to pay them!
Google is amazing …