Google’s Go-To AI Guy Sees Phones Getting Much Smarter

If you're living in fear of the robot uprising, Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, has some bad news: artificial intelligence (AI) is already here. On the plus side, Norvig, who teaches AI at Stanford University and is the coauthor ofArtificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, argues that robots are helping us, rather than trying to destroy us. wired sent a human to question him.

How do you introduce AI to your students?

We think of AI as understanding the world and deciding how to make good decisions. Dealing with uncertainty but still being able to make good decisions is what separates AI from the rest of computer science.

So AI isn't all about talking robots?

We try to get away from that part and leave it to philosophers. We tell our students that there are multiple ways of thinking of AI. Do you want to focus on thinking or doing? We want to focus on the actions, because that's what matters. Computer scientist Edgar Dykstra said that the question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim. In English, we say submarines don't swim, but we say aeroplanes do fly. In Russian, they say submarines do swim.

If we don't think of AI as HAL, is it already here?

Behind the scenes, machines are doing so much. Every time you buy something with a credit card, there are AI programs trying to detect whether this is fraud or not. And that just goes on. It's everywhere. In the last 20 years the idea of what AI is seems to have changed. Now it's much more embedded and is everywhere. In the movie 2001, the idea was that AI was one big machine. Now, we think of it more as something that you hold in your hand than something that fills a room. It's embedded everywhere, and it's there not to reason and do everything by itself, but rather to help you do what you want to do.

If that's the case, how useful is the Turing test?

I don't like it that much, in part because I don't care about the philosophy angle. I want to build something useful. We already know how to make humans; I made two of them.

So what's next?

A lot of it is around mobile technology. You've got microphones and cameras out there, so we're interacting with the world in terms of these rich types of data. That data is harder to understand, it's analogue rather than digital.

You'll see better integration in terms of things always being with you: maybe you'll be wearing a Bluetooth headpiece, or you'll have a display in your glasses, and there will be reminders all the time, like, "Hey, this person walking up to you, this is their name, you met him three years ago and this is what you talked about." And you can look like you know what you're saying

How Larry Page Plans To Change Google Forever In 2012

For a long time, Google was boring.

It bought companies and buried them. It released new products, like Buzz and Wave, that nobody cared about.

Larry Page started to change that when he reclaimed control of the company last spring.

He cut a bunch of failures, put new leaders in charge, launched the company's first ever successful social product, Google+, and dropped more than $12 billion on a phone manufacturer, Motorola.

Some of these ideas might turn out to be stupid or not work out the way he expected. But at least they're not boring.

Page says Google is no longer a "search company." He says its model is: invent wild thing that will help humanity, get them adopted by users, profit, and then use the corporate structure to keep inventing new things.

So what does Larry have up his sleeve this year?

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt tipped this one last month, telling an Italian newspaper that Google will "market a tablet of the highest quality" in the next six months.

So far, most Android tablets have flopped (except for Amazon's Kindle Fire, which is only Android way deep down and has no connections to Google services), and the platform is infuriatingly buggy and unreliable.

That has to change. So Google will probably to take an approach like it has with the Nexus Android phones, working closely with one hardware partner to create the ideal Android tablet.

A pay TV service

This one has been rumored since last fall.

Google is moving all the pieces into place -- Motorola can provide the set top boxes, Google TV is the software, and the fiber optic network in Kansas City provides the pipe. It's even got a great original content channel in YouTube.

Now all it needs are some big content deals like the cable TV providers have.

Billions to spend on video content

Last year, Google was close to dropping $4 billion to buy Hulu, but couldn't quite reach terms -- Google wanted to be sure it could extend Hulu's content deals for longer than Hulu's owners were willing to offer them.

So why not license the content directly from media companies just like Comcast and every cable company does today? Sure, it would cost billions, but Google would be able to bolster a lot of its newer products, from Android tablets to Google TV, and would have a whole new advertising business to mine.

5 Ways To Use Google's Search Plus Your World

Google has revamped its search functions again, and again it's stirring strong responses. Its latest -- a search personalization feature called Search Plus Your World -- plucks material from Google+ for your search results.

Response ranges from users questioning the propriety of drawing content from circles to some who find it useful and others who just don't like updates. Some privacy advocates recommend a look by the Federal Trade Commission. Some Google competitors are crying foul, and user reviews are mixed.

But short of an antitrust or privacy investigation by federal authorities, chances are SPYW is here to stay -- forever mucking up or improving your search experience, depending on your point of view.

So how can you get the most utility out of Google's new search feature? Here are five tips to help you maximize the usefulness of Search plus Your World even if that means turning the feature off permanently.

People Search

Search plus Your World makes it really easy to find people online, as long as they're on Google+.  Start typing a person's name into the search box on Google.com and their Google+ profile will show up as an autosuggestion. This is really helpful if you need to find online information about a friend or are looking for an acquaintance to whom you may not be connected through Google+, but who might be accessible via a friend. You can also use SPYW to find the Google+ profiles of notable people such as celebrities and artists.

Once you click on an autosuggested name, their Google+ profile and other information will show up on the search results page. You can also search for content directly in their Google+ profile from the search box at the top of the page. To revert back to regular search, just delete the little contact card in the Google search box.

Surface Great Content

Since Search Plus Your World incorporates recommended and shared sites from people you're connected to on Google+, adding new people can reveal content you may not see otherwise.

Adding this circle can surface recommended content such as interesting blogs, helpful tutorials and so on.

Create Special Circles

As you're going about your day searching on Google, you may come across Google+ profiles of people who interest you. Most often these profiles will appear in the right-hand column next to the main search results.

Let's say you're searching for information about fishing, because you've decided to take it up as a new hobby. If you come across Google+ profiles for fellow fishing fans, create a circle in Google+ called "Fishing" and add the new people you find. Now, whenever those people share something related to fly fishing on Google+, it will surface in your search results.

Edit Your Circles

So you've added a bunch of people to Google+, but now you feel you're getting too many recommendations or photos from a specific person; let's call that person Scott Blend. To dial down Scott Blend's influence on your search results, you need to edit your Circles by going to plus.google.com/u/0/circles and click on "People who've added you." Type "Scott Blend" into the search box at the far right side of the page. Once you've found Scott Blend, click on his card and then click "Ignore" on the far right side of the page.

Turn it Off

Can't stand Google's personalization and you just want to see your plain old search results? You can turn off SPYW for individual searches by clicking on the globe icon on the far right of any search results page.

To turn off personalization permanently, go to your search preferences, scroll down to "Personal results," and select "Do not use personal results." Then click on "Save" at the bottom and watch your friends disappear from your search results.

Google accused of favouring Google Plus in search results

The longstanding and persistent accusation that Google unfairly uses its search engine to promote its other online services is once again in the spotlight, triggered by new social search functionality the company is rolling out this week that more tightly links its search engine with its Google+ social networking site.

The complaints have come from different quarters, including competitors and industry experts, and have focused on various arguments, but at bottom all charge Google with using its dominant search engine to deliberately boost Google+'s popularity, by giving Google+ pages and profiles an artificially prominent position in result pages.

Unfair competition

One of the strongest arguments made so far comes from search engine expert Danny Sullivan, who described on his technology news site Search Engine Land how Google is now suggesting Google+ business pages that companies and public figures have set up on the site in a way that makes the Google+ pages much more prominent than similar pages these public figures and organisations have set up on competing social media sites.

Sullivan shows a variety of examples in which Google, via new query auto-complete suggestions for Google+ profiles and via the new Google+ People and Pages sidebar suggestions column, favors Google+ business pages over alternative ones that have more "fans" on Facebook and Twitter.

Sullivan ran his queries without being logged into his Google Account, and even using the Chrome browser's "incognito" mode, to make sure that the Google search engine treated his queries as coming from a fairly generic user, and not tailored to him specifically.

"Is there anyone out there who still wants to say that being on Google+ doesn't matter? Anyone? Because when being on Google+ means that you potentially can have your Google+ page leap to the top in those sidebar results, Google+ matters. It matters more than ever before," he wrote, adding that Google is clearly "taking its weight in search and leveraging it to boost Google+ in a big way".

Key product

Google, after many missteps in the social networking market, launched Google+ in mid-2011, and has made it clear, from CEO Larry Page on down, that Google+ will be a key, unifying product for the company, providing social sharing features and an identity layer across most Google online services.

However, there has been skepticism regarding the adoption and engagement level for Google+, especially when compared with social networking leader Facebook, which has more than 850 million active members who spend a lot of time on the site.

Google+ is also a rival to Twitter because Google+ can be used in similar ways as the microblogging phenomenon.

In fact, among the first to cry foul this week was Twitter. Its General Counsel Alex Macgillivray, who previously worked at Google, posted on his Twitter account that Tuesday was "a bad day for the Internet" after Google announced the new search functionality.

"Having been there, I can imagine the dissension @Google to search being warped this way," he wrote. Twitter later followed Macgillivray's post with a more formal statement, in which it reiterated and expanded on his complaint.

Meanwhile, Google answered back with a post on its main Google+ page, saying it was "a bit surprised by Twitter's comments" because Twitter "chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer," a reference to the now lapsed two year deal which gave Google special access to Twitter's "firehose" of real-time tweets.

However, as Sullivan and others have pointed out, Google has continued indexing Twitter posts and has a massive collection of them in its index, including links to the official accounts of public figures, celebrities and organisations.

Silence from Facebook

Throughout the two day flap, Facebook officials have remained mum. Facebook has its own special search arrangement with its partner Microsoft, which gives the Bing search engine access to certain data that is out of Google's reach. While Facebook keeps most personal profile content off limits to search engines, its business profiles are public, as well as some other content, and thus available to Google.

In fact, for a while Facebook has let individuals tag status updates as "public" and made those available to search engines, a good example of this is the site YourOpenBook, devoted exclusively to this type of public status update.

In its announcement on Tuesday of the new social search features, described by the company as "Search, Plus Your World," Google focused on new things its search users will be able to do when signed into their Google accounts: find Google+ posts and Picasa Web photos they and their contacts on those social media sites have shared not only publicly on the web but also privately with each other.

This new functionality builds on the existing Google social search features, which let users logged into their Google Accounts see links in search results that their specific social media contacts tagged with the Google +1 button or shared publicly using a social media service.

Google didn't respond to a request for comment about the controversy surrounding the new social search functionality.

Google+ users to get 'preference' in search results

Google Inc will provide more personalized search results for users by tapping content from its Google+ service, including photos, news and comments that are posted on the social network. 

A new service called Search, Plus Your World will display more content for users who log into Google, providing access to items they may have put on Google+ or from friends' posts, said Amit Singhal, who focuses on improving information retrieval at the Mountain View, California-based company. If someone searches for a dog, for instance, pictures of friends' dogs might show up first in the search results. 

"At Google, we always want to return the most comprehensive and relevant answers to your questions, and many times those answers are in the open public Web, but many times those answers are in your own personal content," Singhal said. "This is the first time we're bringing personal content right into the results page." 

Google, the world's biggest search engine, aims to ward off competition from Microsoft Corp'sBing and Facebook Inc. Last year, Bing began displaying Facebook data, such as restaurants, brands and links friends have recommended, in its search results. Facebook has more than 800 million members, compared with more than 40 million for Google+ as of October. 

Facebook, Twitter

Google's search service doesn't include content from Facebook or microblogging service TwitterInc. The changes under the new Google service could make finding Twitter posts on news events more difficult, San Francisco-based Twitter said. 

"People have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the internet," Twitter said in an e-mailed statement. "We're concerned that as a result of Google's changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone." 

Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, declined to comment on the new search service. 

Google wants to be comprehensive in its search results, according to Gabriel Stricker, a spokesman for the company. 

"Google does not have access to crawl all the information on some sites, so it's not possible for us to surface all that content," Stricker said in an e-mail today. "Based on current policies from many social networks, we currently only have persistent access to information from Google+." 

Bing plays catch-up

While Google remains dominant in internet queries, Microsoft has gained ground. In December, Bing had 15.1 per cent of US internet queries, up from 13.9 per cent in March, according to ComScore Inc. 

Microsoft passed Yahoo to become the No. 2 search engine last month. Yahoo dropped to 14.5 per cent in the period, down from 15.1 per cent the previous month and 15.7 per cent in March. Google's share was 65.9 per cent in December, compared with 65.7 per cent in March. 

As part of Google's search changes, the company is rolling out a feature called Profiles in Search. It has an auto-complete function that brings up links to friends' Google+ accounts while users are still entering queries in the search box. It also will give suggestions on whom to follow on Google+. 

Google's new personal content on search-results pages, which will be rolled out in the coming days, can come from Google+ accounts or its photo-sharing feature Picasa. Google shares rose less than 1 per cent today to $623.14 at the close in New York. The shares rose 8.7 per cent last year.

How Larry Page Changed Meetings At Google After Taking Over Last Spring

Last spring, when Larry Page retook the reins at Google, sources tell us that one of his first acts was to send a companywide email explaining how to run meetings more efficiently -- like a hungry startup instead of a 30,000 person company.

Today, Google finally revealed a little more about what he said.

In the latest edition of Think Quarterly, Google's new online newsletter, operations VP Kristen Gil explains the basics:

• Every meeting must have one clear decision maker. If there's no decision maker -- or no decision to be made -- the meeting shouldn't happen.

• No more than 10 people should attend.

• Every person should give input, otherwise they shouldn't be there.

• No decision should ever wait for a meeting. If a meeting absolutely has to happen before a decision should be made, then the meeting should be scheduled immediately.

These rules sound like common sense, but they often disappear as companies get large and people call meetings more for political or ego-boosting reasons than to actually get anything done.

Gil also explains that Page's big reorganization, in which the company was divided into seven product groups with clear leaders, was done to make sure that the buck stopped with a single person. She credits this organizational scheme with letting Google+ release more than 100 new features in its first 90 days -- more like a startup.

‘Hard question' at Google interview

After having worked in Google as employee number 59 from 1999 to 2005, Douglas Edwards finds himself to be impatient with the way the world works. “Why is it so hard to schedule a recording on my DVR? Why aren't all the signal lights synched to keep traffic flowing at optimum speed? Why, if I punch in my account number when I call customer service, do I have to give it to them again when I get a live person?” Listing all these questions in I'm Feeling Lucky , he adds that these are all solvable problems, because smart people, motivated to make things better, can do almost anything.

At the job interview, the author faces Sergey posing some straight questions, such as, ‘What promotion did you do that was most effective?' ‘What metrics did you use to measure it?' and ‘What types of viral marketing did you do?' followed by what Edwards found tough: ‘What was your GPA?'

Not having thought about his grade point average since the day he had received his diploma in 1981, the author reminisces that even after the company offered him a job, the HR people kept pestering him for a college transcript and his SAT scores. “It was a classic Google moment. Your SAT score was the measure of your intellectual capability; your GPA represented your ability to execute on that potential. The value of your future contribution to Google could be plotted using just those two data points.”

The ‘hard question,' however, was what Sergey gave the author five minutes to answer. “When I come back, I want you to explain to me something complicated that I don't already know,” Sergey had said. Wondered Edwards what could be that complicated thing… “Diaper changing didn't seem appropriate. How newspapers are printed? Kind of dull. I decided to go with the general theory of marketing, which was fresh in my mind because I'd only learned it recently.” He began putting on a paper what he had read in Michael Porter's ‘Competitive Strategy' and David Aaker's books on branding. Such as, the five Ps (or was it six?), the four Ms, barriers to entry, differentiation on quality or price.

But after sitting through the author's presentation at the white board – filled with furiously drawn circles and squares and arrows unleashed the way Legolas would do – Sergey had more questions to ask: “What's the most effective barrier to entry? What's more important: product differentiation or promotion? How does the strategy change if the price is zero?”

Starting to work as Google's online brand manager on November 29, 1999, the author found that he had been hired during one of the company's first big staffing ramp-ups, and the new faces included: Charlie Ayers, the Google chef; massage therapists Babette Villasenor and Bonnie Dawson; webmaster Karen White; and Shari Fujii, the offline marketing manager.

And he found the office space was even more Spartan in the daytime than it had appeared during his interview. One large room held a dozen desks made of wooden doors mounted on metal sawhorses, the author describes. There were small offices scattered around the perimeter, each occupied by at least two workstations sporting large-screen monitors, and a single bookshelf crammed with programming books was tucked into a corner, he continues. “I felt as if a crew of small-parts assemblers might show up any minute, cover the tables with soldering guns and pieces of metal, and begin making toasters or robot dogs or locking mechanisms for seat belts. Generically utilitarian would be a generous description.”

NUTS: Google, Apple Break Sales Records, Verizon Takes Heat from Consumers

IPhone 4S Debuts in China, Apple Makes an Unprecedented Payout

Apple is preparing to launch the iPhone 4S in China next week after months of regulatory hurdles, as the company ramps up its competition against Google Android. The 4S sold out in minutes when it debuted in Hong Kong in November, and with strong promotion through regional carriers, sales are expected to soar. The 4S will also debut in several countries in Africa and the Caribbean, including the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Jamaica, the British Virgin Islands, Bolivia, Antigua and Botswana.

The iPhone 4S continues to perform well, but the iPad 2 faces increasing competition from Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet. To bolster its book division, Apple plans to discuss its iBooksplatform at a media event at the end of January, and rumors point to everything from a revamped iBookstore to new licensing deals, or even a decision to jump into the world of textbooks.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company is also looking to boost its struggling mobile advertising business by hiring Todd Teresi, former vice president of Adobe, as the new vice president of iAd. Many companies remain discouraged from using the service due to expensive ad space and a limited audience, even in the wake of discounts on ad space Apple offered last year.

At least one of Apple's numerous court cases will end in a pricey $5 million patent settlement. Apple will remit the sum to Taiwanese company Elan Microelectronics to avoid going to court next month over elements of touchpad design, and the deal includes a cross-licensing agreement allowing the two companies to use one anothers' patents going forward.

Meanwhile, iPhone 4S users are consuming more data than ever, doubling usage over previous iPhone models. The increase is reportedly due to Siri, the 4S's voice recognition software system, and it is placing additional stress on an already spectrum-crunched network.

Steve Jobs will be immortalized in the form of a new action figure, as memorials of the late Apple co-founder continue to pay homage to his genius. Creator, In Icons, is taking pre-orders for the 12-inch action figure, priced at $100, with shipment set for the end of February.

Google+ hits 2.6m UK visitors, 66.7m worldwide

The figures, which do not include visits via mobile, show that Google's recently launched social networking site ranked the UK as the seventh-highest country in terms of monthly visitors, close behind Japan, but falling some way short of Euro territories France and Germany, and emerging markets Brazil and India.

Worldwide traffic for the site in November was 66.7 million unique visitors, with 14.7 million of those coming from the top territory, the US.

Google+ recorded its second-highest traffic from internet users in India for that period, with 4.3 million unique visits, followed by Brazil with 3.6 million uniques, Germany with 3.4 million and France with 3.4 million.

Its UK traffic is still a long way from rivalling Facebook, however, with that site receiving 32.3 million unique visits in November. Twitter, meanwhile, received 8.7 million uniques for the same period, according to comScore.

Google+ launched in September last year as the search giant moved to secure its place among rivals in the burgeoning social media space. It expanded the service to brands in November.

At its last public count in October 2011, Google claimed to have 40 million users of the social network worldwide.

However three months later, analyst Paul Allen was widely reported after predicting Google+ had 62 million users, and was achieving a rate of new signups of 625,000 per day

Google has recently started to roll out a new search homepage, as part of ongoing design changes to its services and products, to create a brand consistency online.

Countries with largest Google+ audience (in millions)
		Google+ audience
	Location	Total unique visitors (000)	In millions
	World-Wide	66,756	66.7
1	United States	14,739	14.7
2	India	4,260	4.3
3	Brazil	3,626	3.6
4	Germany	3,382	3.4
5	France	3,361	3.4
6	Japan	2,637	2.6
7	United Kingdom	2,587	2.6
8	Canada	2,562	2.6
9	Turkey	1,826	1.8
10	Spain	1,596	1.6
11	Italy	1,274	1.3
12	Russia	1,240	1.2
13	Poland	1,064	1.1
14	Mexico	1,002	1

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