Re: Google Knowledge Graph Experiment

On 5/21/12 12:01 PM, Steve Harris wrote:
> 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 <http://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.

Of course "big bang" releases are unwise. Just as it is unwise to make a 
staggered release and not make it crystal clear to the target audience.

As I stated in one of my post, the real issue here is that they had a 
live demo page [1] with a link [2]. Clicking on said link provided 
different results (i.e., different web pages) for different users. All 
they had to do was indicate that results would vary due to the staggered 
nature of their rollout.


>
> 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 :)

Of course, but note the point I am making about clarity.
>
> FWIW, I now see it on google.com <http://google.com>, but not 
> google.co.uk <http://google.co.uk> - doesn't matter if I'm logged in 
> or not.

Yes, and that's today, 21st May 2012 :-)

Links:

1. http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html -- 
showcase page
2. https://www.google.com/search?q=vincent+van+gogh -- "Give It A Try" 
link that delivered different results (this page still provides no 
information about the nature of the rollout etc..).


>
> - Steve
>
> -- 
> Steve Harris, CTO
> Garlik, a part of Experian
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-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder&  CEO
OpenLink Software
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