Google 2.0: Why MIT scientists are building a new search engine | Danny Hillis | Big Think

Among other projects, and you were doing lots of stuff, you get involved in some very heady questions about the origins of truth on the Internet. This is where we're getting, folks, because the work that Danny is describing now in theory ultimately became a venture, right? Metaweb, don’t so.

So, that’s right. What I really thought is that what we need to do is have a way of representing the knowledge of the world in a way that machines can get at them and take advantage of it. That should be shared; everybody should be able to get at it. That's in some sense that if the nonhuman knowledge isn't a shared resource, then what is? I think, what have civilization been doing all these years?

So, I created a company that built this database called Freebase. Was Freebase a free database? The company basically took any kind of public knowledge that we can get information about anything and put it in a machine-readable format. We were kind of creating it with the idea that this is gonna be useful to the world. We didn't really have a business model, and we started building it up. Then, it became useful to lots of different people, including in particular all the search engines.

So eventually, Google bought it, of course, and then I got Google to agree to keep it open for three years. But they only kept the part that was already open open, and they started building it up. Now, Google has something called the Knowledge Graph, which is beyond the evolution of this, and it probably has about a hundred billion different entities.

So everybody in this room is in that graph. The building this building is in that graph. Yeah, I took a screenshot when you just Google know your house and all of these different. Yeah, this event is, and yeah, so anything like a person, a place, an event, anything like that is in this huge knowledge base, and all the relationships between them are.

So, when you, for instance, print out a Google Mail, that is rendered from the Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph knows the bus schedules, and it knows, you know, the address of the restaurant and the traffic, slowing all this information together around the thing that the searcher cares about. That's right.

So, the map is just, in some sense, a custom rendering of a piece of the Knowledge Graph for your particular purpose. Yeah, and also, by the way, I don’t know this doesn’t have any ads on it, but the other thing is that the ads are also a lot of knowledge graph about what the products are about.

You know, it probably has knowledge about you specifically and so on. So, it's going to be way beyond the kind of public knowledge; it's also beginning to probably have very particular private knowledge about people too. Now, from Google's perspective, it's safe to say that this is a quantum leap in terms of the original basis of its sort of citation-based search.

You know, model all of a sudden it is now providing this multi-dimensional search that is drawing in way more richness. Yeah, so that it still does the old kind of search. So right now, when you, let’s say, I put in museums of New York, yeah, museums in New York, well, it still does the old keyword search of searching for pages that have the word museum and the phrase New York.

But it doesn’t, if you say an exhibition in Manhattan or something, but you might have something as a museum in New York that actually didn’t use the word museum in New York on the page. But the Knowledge Graph knows that Manhattan is in New York, and it knows that exhibitions are in museums or may know something is a museum even if it doesn’t use the word museum in its title.

So, it’s actually able to pick that up even though it doesn’t have the keyword, so that will play into the search results to come up. It does a search that’s based on the semantics, and of course, that’s very important because that kind of knowledge is completely language independent too.

So, the same knowledge that informs your search in English also informs somebody’s search in Mandarin and/or Hindi, something like that. So, but the bad ...