Re: Google Knowledge Graph Experiment

On 2012-05-18, at 19:55, Kingsley Idehen wrote:

> On 5/18/12 1:39 PM, Eric Franzon wrote:
>> 
>> I also am still not getting to view GKG enrichments either. It truly seems to be a gradual roll-out (as Google         confirmed to us yesterday: http://semanticweb.com/google-knowledge-graph-interview_b29172). I have tried all three of my Google accounts, all of which have completed profiles, but to no avail. 
> 
> Remember, my *theory* is that this is an early example of a profile-driven-service roll-out. Nothing wrong with that, but Google made some disconcerting mistakes. Here's my sequence of events:
> 
> 1. I open up the doc at: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html, following the service announcement
> 2. clicked on the "Give it a try" link 
> 3. saw nothing
> 4. 24 hours later (yesterday EST) I stumbled across Paul's post (as per Twitter thread that ensued)
> 5. kicked off experiment to test my theory. 
> 
> At step 1 above, nothing from Google indicated to me that if don't see anything it was due to staggered roll-out. In short, the disclaimer still doesn't exist on that page. 
> 
> However you look at it, this is an algorithm gone wrong, and it does have implications. 
>> 
>> What the representative we interviewed indicated is that they are rolling out slowly to account holders "over the next few days." THEN, they will begin with general Google.com visitors. And then I suspect they will (again gradually) start rolling it out across other global Googles.
> 
> All vague commentary, the kind that is kinda scary and a little creepy. Again, I doubt it was intentional, but there are some realities bubbling up to the surface re. profiles and the Web etc.. 

While I think Google in general behaves in quite a creepy way, I suspect this is more about the realities of rolling out complex software to a billion people.

It's extremely challenging, and doing it for all users simultaneously is very unwise. We have many times less users, and still do staged deployments.

All kinds of weird corner cases can't be tested in pre-production, and you don't want to annoy your entire user-base in one fell swoop :)

FWIW, I now see it on google.com, but not google.co.uk - doesn't matter if I'm logged in or not.

- Steve

-- 
Steve Harris, CTO
Garlik, a part of Experian
1-3 Halford Road, Richmond, TW10 6AW, UK
+44 20 8439 8203  http://www.garlik.com/
Registered in England and Wales 653331 VAT # 887 1335 93
Registered office: Landmark House, Experian Way, Nottingham, Notts, NG80 1ZZ