Always On

Google’s director of search quality discusses challenges of automation, knowledge, spam, and even politics

There are four individual challenges. First is a chicken-and-egg problem: How do we build this information, because what’s the point of building the tools unless you got the information, and what’s the point of putting the information in there unless you have tools. A friend of mine just asked can I send him all the URLs on the web that have dot-RDF, dot-OWL, and a couple other extensions on them; he couldn’t find them all. I looked, and it turns out there’s only around 200,000 of them. That’s about 0.005% of the web. We’ve got a ways to go.

The next problem is competing ontologies. Everybody’s got a different way to look at it. You have some tools to address it. We’ll see how far that will scale. Then the Cyc problem, which is a problem of background knowledge, and the spam problem. That’s something I have to face every day. As you get out of the lab and into the real world, there are people who have a monetary advantage to try to defeat you.

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