It's amazing how people just don't get what Google is doing, and why. As with Microsoft, they do lots of things that are failures on their face but serve secondary purposes.
A free 411 service that is promoted in lots of odd places. Duh, they want to train a speech-to-text parser, and that's the best way to do it.
Gmail is much better than Yahoo Mail but lags behind, it was invite-only, etc. But they have a very valuable probe into people's mailing habits. Spam usually needs a link, so they can better detect and remove spam pages from their index. And via the invite map, they have a nice graph of connections and influences between people. I'll bet cash they've used email analysis to gauge the price of new keywords or even the "buzz" index of startups.
Free website analysis? Free wireless? Free "web accelerators"? Beautiful way to get the information they need to make their index better. There is no need to be #1 n any of these things.
"Duh, they want to train a speech-to-text parser, and that's the best way to do it."
I'm not sure I agree. But what do I know? The problem to me seems to be individual speakers who can vary so greatly as to make any one prediction, based on a population-phoneme histogram, very noisy. Speech recognition works decently now when individuals train their own classifiers. I'm not sure why products don't coalesce around those specific voice profiles. Here's an example where, I think, one massive effort to collect many examples is actually more problematic than helpful. It may work for easily discriminated phonemes (e.g., one, two, three, four) but the pronounced lexicon is a minefield of starlust knights. Context helps greatly, but that's much more data than would be acquired in a 411 call.
A free 411 service that is promoted in lots of odd places. Duh, they want to train a speech-to-text parser, and that's the best way to do it.
Gmail is much better than Yahoo Mail but lags behind, it was invite-only, etc. But they have a very valuable probe into people's mailing habits. Spam usually needs a link, so they can better detect and remove spam pages from their index. And via the invite map, they have a nice graph of connections and influences between people. I'll bet cash they've used email analysis to gauge the price of new keywords or even the "buzz" index of startups.
Free website analysis? Free wireless? Free "web accelerators"? Beautiful way to get the information they need to make their index better. There is no need to be #1 n any of these things.
The same thing can be said for News, etc.