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Social search - is Google missing a trick?

Steve, have you tried Greplin and if so what's your experience? Does it negate the need for other search tools (I don't want a proliferation of search tools)? Does the indexing slow up your machine?

Gary, it does a better search of your social networks than Google, probably because you're giving it permission to index them. You still need a general search engine (such as Google) for the broader internet content. Indexing has no impact on your machine. I haven't used it long enough to determine whether or not it's features are useful enough to make it my first choice search engine for social media/social network content.

"For problems that are original, whose answers are not already known, and that require intuition, judgment and ingenuity, you need people. Smart people who not only know how to search, but who have the expertise and judgment to know whether what they've found is most relevant to solving the problem at hand."

Google answers these questions with the help from deep neural networks, a form of artificial intelligence rapidly remaking not just Google's search engine but the entire company and, well, the other giants of the internet, from Facebook to Microsoft.

Google extends its Knowledge Graph 

"Search and Analyze the Social Web"

Google Search itself provides one of the most familiar examples of predictive intelligence. When you enter keywords in the search box, Google predicts what you are interested in and then presents you with results that match that intent. Since it released the first version of its Prediction API in 2010, Google has made some of these methods available to developers. Adoption among developers has not been high because machine learning requires a lot of infrastructure and validation to produce accurate results. Developers have also reported discomfort with basing products on black box APIs.

Most intranets are an absolute and utter joke. Enterprise search is pathetic. Why? Because today's management culture has no interest in making the work lives of -particularly its knowledge workers - easier and more productive. In fact, management practice often heaps more complexity and awful, unusable systems on top of frustrated, overwhelmed employees.

In September, the Wikimedia Foundation won a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to start building the "Wikimedia Knowledge Engine," a "system for discovering reliable and trustworthy public information on the internet," according to grant documents, which were released late last week. That the Knowledge Engine, now known as "Wikimedia Discovery," even existed was news to the Wikipedia editors community, who say the project's secretive nature and very existence are fundamentally at odds with Wikimedia's transparent ethos.

How do we learn the meaning of text from data? In other words, how can a machine truly understand the phrases that human beings blab into its search fields and microphone? The researchers at Google and elsewhere have settled on an answer to that question: machine learning; specifically, a form of artificial intelligence called neural networks-self-organising systems modelled on the way the brain works.

Microsoft's research arm and Bing search engine business unit released on Wednesday a chat bot named Tay, which is powered by artificial intelligence technologies.

BM's Watson Artificial Intelligence System is capable of searching across vast repositories of unstructured data and returning answers to natural language queries, but it won't replace humans. Instead, the system will augment humans and help us to make better decisions.

Many companies are seeing that the future of deep learning is here, and that it doesn't require a lot of money or resources to take advantage of this new industrial science. IBM's Watson Analytics offers a freemium service that allows you to upload up to 500MB, and enables you to explore your own real-life applications for deep learning. Inputting Google Adwords or other sales metrics into this tool can help even startup companies find relational and predictive information in their data.

"Search software with a difference. Seems to only be in Beta testing at the moment, but looks very relevant to Locate, Connect."

They're looking for evaluation partners

Senior executives searching for growth face a stark new reality: roughly 400 midsize cities in emerging markets-cities they mostly will have never heard of-are posed to generate nearly 40 percent of global growth over the next 15 years. That's more growth than the combined total of all developed economies plus the emerging markets' megacities (those with populations of more than ten million, such as Mumbai, São Paulo, and Shanghai), which together have been the historic focus of most multinationals. Learning about consumer attitudes in the emerging markets' "middleweight" cities (three-quarters of which have less than two million people), figuring out market entry strategies for them, and deciding how to allocate resources within and across them will all be crucial priorities in the years ahead.

"The future of digital culture-yours, mine, and ours-depends on how well we learn to use the media that have infiltrated, amplified, distracted, enriched, and complicated our lives. How you employ a search engine, stream video from your phonecam, or update your Facebook status matters to you and everyone, because the ways people use new media in the first years of an emerging communication regime can influence the way those media end up being used and misused for decades to come. Instead of confining my exploration to whether or not Google is making us stupid, Facebook is commoditizing our privacy, or Twitter is chopping our attention into microslices (all good questions), I've been asking myself and others how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and above all mindfully. This book is about what I've learned."

It's not humans who are the recipients and decision makers of data and analysis, it's machines. Machines are making all or most of the decisions in areas like programmatic advertising, search engine optimization, credit approval, insurance underwriting, Internet of Things applications, and many more.

Google believes that artificial intelligence (A.I.) virtual assistants (VA) and the conversational user interface (CUI) will largely supplant search engines and mobile apps for many users. We're moving into an "A.I.-first world," according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.