Jonathan Bartlett: Google’s secret of success is the human mind, not Big Data

                  Jonathan Bartlett, Research and Education Director of the Blyth Institute

No, Google found a way to harness YOUR wants and needs:

To understand how this works, think back to the Google’s early days (founded 1998). It actually had the smallest dataset of the competitors in the field of search engines. Other companies could find more words faster. Other companies had better document searches. So what made Google a better search engine in the long run?

Google’s original success came from harnessing the linking structure of the web. But where do these links come from? From nature? No. Links unearth a sea of human intentionality lurking in the pages.

While people can and do say almost anything about themselves on a web page, they rarely refer users elsewhere unless they really want those users to go and check out the other page. After all, they are asking you, the user, to pay attention to something other than themselves. Therefore, the links provide a way to identify the greatest level of human intentionality. The famed Google PageRank algorithm is Google’s first method of harnessing intentionality. More.

Bartlett goes on to talk about the second method, where the money was.

But just think, intentionality is all over the place but no one had found a way to actually capture and harness it in quite the same way.

Also by Jonathan Bartlett: Who built AI? You did, mostly.

and

“Artificial” artificial intelligence: What happens when AI needs a human I?

Also: Explore the concept of intentionality, an immaterial power of the human mind connected with free will, with Michael Egnor in Do either machines—or brains— really learn? and Neurosurgeon outlines why machines can’t think.

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