the latest trend in crowdsourcing: organizing foreign workers on a mass scale to do routine jobs that computers aren't yet good at, like checking spreadsheets or reading receipts. .... The best-known crowd marketplace is Mechanical Turk, which Amazon launched in 2005. ..... Turkers, who are based mostly in the United States, make only $1 or $2 per hour. ..... 41 percent of all jobs posted to Mechanical Turk were for generating spam, generating clicks on ads, or influencing search engine results ..... Consider inDinero, a three-year-old San Francisco Web startup whose software helps small businesses track their finances. Businesses can e-mail or upload scanned receipts (including handwritten ones) that then need to get logged—so inDinero sends the images to MobileWorks, which in turn farms them out to workers in India or the Philippines, who transcribe the receipt amounts into online forms.
Computer algorithms have started to write news stories, compose music, and pick hits...... The process record labels use to find new talent—A&R, for "artists and repertoire"—is fickle and hard to explain ...... an algorithm tasked with finding hit songs. .... hundreds of books and studies that have attempted to explain creativity as the product of mysterious processes within the right side of the human brain. Creativity, the thinking has been, proves just how different people are from CPUs. ..... When Novak submitted a song to McCready's engine through the Web, it was graded on a par with classic hits such as I've Got a Feeling by the Eagles and Steppenwolf's Born to Be Wild.
You may have a hit.
Music X-Ray's algorithms use Fourier transforms—a method of separating a signal from the "noise" of complex data—to isolate a song's base melody, beat, tempo, rhythm, octave, pitch, chords, progression, sonic brilliance, and several other factors that catch a listener's ear. The software then builds three-dimensional models of the song based on these properties and compares it with hit songs of the past. Putting a just-analyzed song on the screen with No. 1 tracks of yore shows a kind of cloud structure filled in with dots representing songs. The hits tend to be grouped in clusters, which reveal similar underlying structures. Get close to the middle of one of those clusters and you may have a hit.
And why, writing also. This bodes well for natural language search and communication, the idea that you can have a conversation with anyone in real time regardless of if they speak your language.
Music lends itself naturally to being parsed by algorithms—mathematics is mixed up in every chord, beat, and harmony that we hear. ..... Bots can't yet script prose worthy of awards, but on some metrics of economic importance to publishers—such as number of page views a site registers—bots can be far more productive than any journalist. They can write articles in seconds ...... his newer ones have consistently composed classical music that imitates masters like Johann Sebastian Bach so well that people can't always tell the difference
Image via CrunchBaseAbout a decade ago when blogs became popular as a platform, the blogosphere started seriously skewing the Google search results. Google took care of that. Google made the problems go away. In the recent years content farms have messed things up. I have known all along that Google has what it takes to take care of the problem. And looks like Google just delivered.
Content farms do have their place. But they don't get to skew search results.
Google beat the old search engines back in the late 1990s with its concept of PageRank. The more sites that linked to you, the more valuable was your site.
If something like real time search were to become possible, the concept of a dynamic pagerank would emerge. It would not be about how many sites linked to your site alone. It would be about do people actually click on those links to get to your site? Google's search algorithms have gone through so much evolution, and since they have been secret about it all for understantable reasons, it is hard to figure out what they have already done.
Google has been smart about constantly finetuning its search algorithms. They try to beat the so-called Search Engine Optimization people. It is a constant tussle.
Another thing would be content itself. After billions of search queries from people, Google should be able to figure out what sites and pages best delivered for what queries, and the number of search terms are for the most part finite. So if you can measure satisfaction, would that affect the way you do PageRank?
What about the content of the page itself? It might be a brand new page, but what if it is the most relevant page to my particular query? I guess search engines are not that good at reading yet.
Content creation and searching content will stick around for a long, long time.
And Bing's recent launch showed presentation is a whole new ballgame altogether. Microsoft decided they can't beat Google at its secret sauce of search, so they decided to take a bite at the other side of the coin: presentation of search results. Calling itself "a decision engine, not a search engine" was also a good marketing move.
They did not beat Google, but they did beat Yahoo, looks like. Now Bing is number two. Shoots for the stars, and you will get the moon.
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