On Wednesday I attended the Executive Round Table on Semantic Search, at the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference. Researchers from Ask, Hakia, Yahoo, Google, Powerset/Bing, and True Knowledge were on the panel. In the next few days I hope to give a longer write-up of the session over on the FXPAL blog. In the meantime I wanted to quickly point out one nugget, and one related Tweet.
The panel covered a large number of topics. But it was inevitable that the moderator would turn to the Google panelist (Peter Norvig) and ask him what he thought about Bing. There has been too much buzz lately for that question not to be asked. I was pleasantly surprised by his answer. I’m not going to risk quoting him, only paraphrasing. And if I misrepresent anything, any mistakes are mine, and not intentional.
[Paraphrase] Norvig’s first answer to the Bing question was to say that he likes the idea of innovation in the user interface. He thinks that there is a lot of room for more such innovation, and for a lot of different reasons. Historically, there has been too much emphasis on getting the ranking right, at the expense of all else. Of course (he added) a quality ranking is something that you absolutely must have. But for too long it has been the only thing that has been worked on, and that needs to change. He thinks Bing has made some good steps, and that there are a lot more that can be made as well.
Wow! This is not the Google that I’ve known for a decade, the Google that has actively shunned most forms of interactivity, feedback, and exploration other than spelling correction. Continue reading…
Recent Comments