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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

Android, iOS, Windows Phone. Each of these mobile platforms had to start somewhere, and none were anywhere near perfect on the first try. Fortunately, each OS gets better with every iteration until, at some point, it all just clicks. Arguably, Windows Phone just came of age with its latest update, version 8.1. Even before today, Windows Phone only had a few big holes remaining and indeed, 8.1 appears to fill those gaps. In particular, the OS now has a fancy notification center in addition to those signature Live Tiles; the keyboard now allows for swipe gestures; and last but not least, it now has Cortana, a virtual assistant to take on Siri, Google Now and Samsung S Voice. The 8.1 update is a fairly significant one, and I got the opportunity to take it for a spin ahead of the official developer preview's launch. It may not be perfect yet, but it's clear Windows Phone has finally grown up. Cortana Windows Phone included a search option from the beginning, and though it was useful at the time, rivals like Siri, S Voice and Google Now have quickly turned the tide, rendering Microsoft first "voice assistant" completely obsolete. Thankfully, the 8.1 update introduces a personal assistant named Cortana to help bring Windows Phone into the modern era. Named after Master Chiefs trusty AI sidekick in Halo, Cortana is designed to help you do whatever you do on a phone. Think: scheduling appointments, alerting you to upcoming flights, telling you the weather, offering up directions, dictating messages, opening apps and adjusting settings. She even tells jokes and responds in humorous ways to (most) silly questions. Those are all givens these days, so let's instead move on to the more unusual things she can do.