| March 9, 2006 @ 1:21 pm | Filed under Internet, Software |
It has been announced that Google has acquired Writely. For all those people who have been wondering whether or not Google was ever going to come out with a Web Office Suite, the answer is now known. Writely has been the best online web suite that I have looked at. I am excited to see where Google is able to take this.
| March 9, 2006 @ 12:48 pm | Filed under Internet |
Today Peter Norvig from Google came and spoke to the Computer Science department here at Brigham Young University. I was glad I was able to attend because he turned out to be a very entertaining speaker. His talk was entitled “AI in the Middle: Mediating Between Author and Reader”. He focused on using artificial intelligence in order to disambiguate written text to provide improved search and question answering.
One of the examples he talked about in terms of knowledge was having Google know that water flows downhill. The reason he gave this example was to show that not all knowledge is important or search worthy. The search term “water flows downhill” contains less than 0.0002% of indexed web pages. This example brought up the point that time should not be wasted trying to acquire all knowledge but to stick to acquiring the knowledge that provides the most results.
Peter Norvig will be the keynote speaker tomorrow at the 6th Annual Family History Technology Workshop at Brigham Young University. He will be talking about “The Future of Search”. Anyone who has an opportunity to hear him speak, I highly recommend doing so.