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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/523846/how-a-database-of-the-worlds-knowledge-shapes-googles-future/ Compiling a giant database of all the facts in the world could help Google's future products understand you better. For all its success, Google's famous Page Rank algorithm has never understood a word of the billions of Web pages it has directed people to over the years. That's why in 2010 Google acquired Metaweb, a company building a database intended to give computers the ability to understand the world. Two years later the company's technology resurfaced as the Knowledge Graph (see "Corliss Tech Review Group: http://thecorlissreviewgroup.com/"). John Giannandrea, vice president of engineering at Google and a Metaweb cofounder, says that will lead to Google's future products being able to truly understand the people who use them and the things they care about. He told MIT Technology Review's Tom Simonite how a data store designed to link together all the knowledge on Earth might do that. What is the Knowledge Graph? It's a distillation of what Google knows about the world. An analogy I often use is maps. For a maps product you have to build a database of the real world and know there are things called streets, rivers, and countries in the physical world. That's creating a symbolic structure for the physical world; the Knowledge Graph does that for the world of ideas and common sense. We have entities in the knowledge graph for foods, recipes, products, ideas in philosophy or history, and famous people. We can have relationships between them, so we can say these two people are married or this place is in this country or we can say this movie is related to this person. How does that make a difference to Google's Web search? We've gone up a level from just talking about the words to talking about what the thing actually is. In crawling and indexing documents we can now have an understanding of what the document is about. If the docum

The way we navigate in cities has been revolutionized in the last few years by the advent of GPS mapping programs. Enter your start and end location and these will give you the shortest route from A to B. That's usually the best bet when driving, but walking is a different matter. Often, pedestrians want the quietest route or the most beautiful but if they turn to a mapping application, they'll get little help. That could change now thanks to the work of Daniele Quercia at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona, Spain, and a couple of pals. These guys have worked out how to measure the "beauty" of specific locations within cities and then designed an algorithm that automatically chooses a route between two locations in a way that maximizes the beauty along it. "The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant," they say. Quercia and co begin by creating a database of images of various parts of the center of London taken from Google Street View and Geograph, both of which have reasonably consistent standards of images. They then crowdsourced opinions about the beauty of each location using a website called UrbanGems.org. Each visitor to UrbanGems sees two photographs and chooses the one which shows the more beautiful location. That gives the team a crowdsourced opinion about the beauty of each location. They then plot each of these locations and their beauty score on a map which they use to provide directions. The idea here is that the user enters a start and end location and an algorithm then finds the most beautiful route, rather than the shortest one. It does this by searching through every possible route, adding the beauty scores for each and choosing the one that ranks highest.