Marissa Mayer on intersection of strong AI and search

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Marissa Mayer of Google gave today’s Keynote conversation. It’s no wonder Google does such wonders when people like this are in charge. I did get a chance to ask about the intersection of search and AI and got a fantastic answer – she thinks they will intersect, and this could happen within about ten years. Also interesting was that she said they are now seeing things that “look like intelligence” emerging from the search algorithms. This is not thought, but she indictated that it’s possible to have thought like processes emerge in this fashion rather than with the massive computational approaches that were popular several years ago. This is consistent with Kurzweil’s notion that it’ll be massive parallel processing and not massive supercomputing that will probably bring the mechanical mind “to life” within the next decade or so. I’m glad Marissa Mayer seems to agree and I hope this is a focus for Google in the future (I got the idea it’s not a focus now).

I had a chance to ask Matt Cutts of Google engineering fame the same question yesterday and he was not as optimistic, thinking that it could take another 50 years to get conscious computing. But Matt correctly noted that Marissa would be more optimistic than he was because his Master’s program at University of North Carolina was lacking in much AI content due to the AI skepticism of the architect of that program.

Larry Page’s recent remarks suggesting that a viable human thinking algorithm may appear fairly soon are more in line with Marissa’s optimistic view that within a decade we could see mature, conscious, artificial intellects. The staggering implications of conscious computing are lost on many people in computing for reasons I simply don’t understand, but I think are related to the current focus on computing science as an engineering and calculation paradigm rather than a biological one. As the brain is reverse engineered and we begin to enhance neurons with forms of programming it seems reasonable to assume things are going to get … very interesting very fast.

Google Party 2007 and SES

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The link buying session was extremely intense and interesting.   In short, Matt continued to suggest that link buying was distorting the natural patterns of the web and is a bad SEO practice while the SEOs on the panel argued that links do work and Google has no right to police them so severely. 

Unfortunately and as I’ve always seen, the debate tends to dwell on extremes on both sides rather than the important middle ground.  I have a lot more to say about this but it’s time for the Google Party!

SES San Jose “Mini-Interviews”

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I’ve had a chance to talk in depth to several folks and will post that later, but wanted to check in before the session on “Is link buying evil” which will feature Matt Cutts from Google and some notable advocates for strategic link buying.    I’ve been surprised to hear from some really good SEO folks here that link buying still works well as part of their strategy, though I think they’d agree it’s very difficult to find the types of links that “work”, and from my perspective you always have a potential gun to your head from SE’s which do not like this practice.   So perhaps the best advice for most is to avoid link buying unless you want to live dangerously.

I had a nice talk at lunch today with Matt Cutts about his view on AI and  severak search themes but no time now to spell out the details.  

A key theme here is the number of SEM firms – many that seem fairly inexperienced.  Lanzone mentioned that it’s  increasingly common for large clients to buy out their SEM firm to bring it all in house and I think that may be a new strategy for the players in SEM.

SES San Jose – Jim Lanzone on Ask’s upcoming billion dollar search deal

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ASK CEO Jim Lanzone was the first keynoter here at Search Engine Strategies San Jose, and Lanzone gave a lot of insightful answers to Chris Sherman’s excellent series of questions about ASK’s future in search and advertising.   A few highlights:

“It’s not a zero sum game” said Lanzone, noting their cooperation with Google in a 100,000,000 ad sponsorship deal and saying the next deal will be in the billions and could be with other players as well as Google.  

ASK 3d is leading to some interesting findings, esp. that 50% of the ASK 3d activity is not in the search listings portion.  Lanzone feels the sweet spot is in the “Collective Context” that billions of searches are bringing to the table now.    ASK’s new “Edison Algorithm” will seek to make sense of the maelstrom of data ASK has from their search property as well as the dozens of separate IAC online businesses.

“Search is now your co-pilot”, said Lanzone, and suggested that the value of search based ads is still very high compared to traditional media.  

Sherman noted that Lanzone’s “Etour” was similar to StumbleUpon.   Lanzone said it was before it’s time and was “Darwined out”.   No plans to revive it are pending. 

Search Engine Strategies – Google Party

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Day one of the four day SES conference is wrapping up although a lot of the conference action takes place at restaurants and bars after hours.   I think for most people the highlight of SES is the huge Google Party which will be held tomorrow night at the Googleplex in Mountain View.   “Meet the Engineers” is one of only a handful of times each year when you can talk directly to a large number of people on the Google search team – the other is WebmasterWorld’s “PubCon”  in Las Vegas.

One thing I learned today is the Google’s Marissa Mayer is an expert in Artificial Intelligence (yikes – ValleyWag says Marissa IS an Artificial Intelligence!), and I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to ask a few questions tomorrow after her keynote about where she sees Google’s AI efforts heading over the next 5-10 years.  Larry Page was recently quoted as suggesting that a human-like thinking “algorithm” could well be cracked fairly soon, and Google is one of the places where this type of innovation might actually take place.  That said, based on my talk with Matt Cutts a few years back I don’t think AI as a search driver is a Google priority.  I was surprised then to hear that Matt felt quality AI driven search was still many years away.    Google has to maintain a practical edge to things so they probably can’t put a huge effort behind a “conscious computing” effort, though I get the idea from Kurzweil’s book that a Googley “massively parallel” info architecture may be more likely to bring consicousness to a machine than, for example, the IBM Blue Gene style supercomputer.

Blogs covering or writing about the SES Search Conference

Session coverage roundup from Barry at Search Engine Land

Search Engine Strategies

SES San Jose

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I’m excited to be at the Search Engine Strategies Conference here in sunny San Jose.  This is the *big event* of Search Marketing and it’ll be fun to cover it as a press person.   Rather than intense live blogging I’m going to try to summarize the day each evening with a post and extensive links out to others who will be doing more authoritative coverage, like Barry and the Search Engine Roundtable gang.    Barry has been doing simply outstanding play by play blogging of search conferences for several years and you can get a great handle on things following conferences from his website.    Even when I’m *attending*, as here in San Jose, I like to read the Search Engine Rountable session summaries.

Public Speaking Tips from Brett

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Brett Tabke is the excellent owner and “last stop” moderator of WebmasterWorld, the largest forum in the world dealing with Search Strategies and SEO. “PubCon” is the WMW conference and is held annually in Las Vegas and at other cities during the year.

The PubCon blog has Brett’s excellent article that is suggesting detailed tips on Public Speaking and preparing a good presentation.

Unfortunately for all of us even good advice goes largely unheeded by speakers for reasons I’ve never understood. Part of the problem is that self-confident, smart folks often are poorly prepared, thinking they can “wing it” because they’ve seen other self-confident smart folks *look like* they wing presentations when in fact really good talks are usually canned and focused more on entertainment than education. I often want to gag when I hear people rave about an entertaining talk as if they learned something, only to 1) note that the talk probably was not really about anything of much substance and 2) watch the raver’s future behaviors change NOT A WIT.

I’ve given several travel technology presentations and I’ve sat through *a lot* of conference presentations over the past ten years or so and it’s pretty clear to me that speakers are more born than made, and they are entertainers not educators. Real learning can be fun but it takes brain work most conference folks simply don’t want to do. This is why the unconference is so effective.  I noted that my “popular” talks tended to deal very simply with complex topics and not go very deep, which just confused people.  Also I’d throw in fun or intriguing items to keep people interested.  Unfortunately this made it tough to really “dig in” and talk about the intricacies of the topic.

For every Guy Kawasaki there are a hundred regular folks and another hundred lousy speakers. Guy is a superb speaker with – I think – a lot of canned presentations that “feel” spontaneous. He injects some anecdotes to shake it up a little, but the one time I heard him talk it was just too polished to be “real”, and I was told after that somebody had seen the same talk before – I think more than once!

The Mind of the Machine … is you?

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I think I like Kurzweil’s optimistic AI scenarios more than this version of reality
that posits we are all computer simulations run by a more advanced intellect which itself may be a computer simulation.

This sounds fanciful, but I’d suggest that this type of philosophical speculation is a lot more pragmatic and reasonable than the Jean Paul Sartre silliness I studied in Philosophy classes back in the 1980’s.

Kurzweil’s very reasonable suggestion is that we’ll soon have conscious, very intelligent computers. He also suggests that these machines will quickly lead to a sort of cosmic explosion of intellect that would easily be capable of massive “simulations” of intelligent life. What if this already has happened? One thing that bugs me about Kurzweil’s ideas is that it seems totally unreasonable to suggest that our feeble earth / human technologies will be the first to make this jump to massive cosmic intelligence. The idea that we’d be the first to do this seems very unreasonable to me given the age of the universe. Our universe has been around for about 15 billion years and we are not all that amazing. I’d think many intelligent creatures would have come around by now. If Kurzweil is right it seems at least a few of these would have made the leap to the singularity-style intellects.

How to reconcile these things? My gut feeling is that we really are physical, evolutionarily designed, meat and potato biological beings who have a capacity to think and reflect that is a product of the massive processing power of the bunches of neocortical columns and synaptic firing that goes on in our brains. Kurzweil is right about the rise of intelligent machines – coming soon to a virtual theater near all of us – but he’s wrong about the exploding cosmic intellect. There will be limitations – probably based on physical laws of our universe relating to speed of light and other constraints – that will prevent us from becoming “too big”. This explains why we’ve (probably) had no contact with other intelligent beings – we are just too far away and unfortunately we live at the edge of our galaxy where presumably a lot fewer intelligences exist than nearer the center.

Pligg for sale, Searchmob, and Arabian Horse Breeding

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TechCrunch reports that Pligg is up for sale.   The clone of the Digg project was a great way to easily and effectively set up a user community where people could submit, review, and rank articles.    John Battelle used it nicely over at SearchMob  in an attempt to enhance his excellent search news coverage at Search Blog.

Unfortunately at SearchMob it seemed to me that the reviews became more of a breeding ground for SEO tactics than a clearinghouse for quality search news.    Several participants would primarily list stories at their own sites that were referencing *other* source stories.   This is not necessarily bad but I found at SearchMob that only a fraction of the stories were “high quality”.    That said I’m not a big fan of Digg either because my interests still don’t seem to match the normal onliner demographic very well.

Pligg may not be the best example of how to make money on Web 2.0 because it was an open project and an advanced concept used by tech-savvy folks more than mainstream people.   Mainstream is where the numbers are and therefore, usually, where the money is.   Still, Pligg had buzz, traffic, and a community.   This should be enough to do well enough to keep building the project.   It’s possible the owners really *could* keep running the site and quit their jobs but want to try for a big payoff now while VC money is still flowing briskly into startups.   In fact this makes a lot of sense and if true it means my analysis here is probably flawed – ie they are selling at opportune time rather than for the stated reasons of “too busy to run it”.

Pligg’s founders suggest that they are selling because they have real jobs and don’t have time to manage the growing and thriving Pligg community.    I find this very interesting because they clearly have done Web 2.0 “right” – they created a useful service, got lots of people actively involved and developing for it, and have a powerful community of users.   So why can’t they quit their jobs and just work on Pligg and rake in lots of money?    Don Dodge’s mini-analysis of some time ago has part of the answer.   Even most VC funded startups don’t appear to return enough for the average VC to break even on the investment.    If true this is a really provocative notion – rich people are funding companies and losing money.   Like Arabian Horse breeding or Casino gambling it may be that playing the startup game is so enjoyable – and the potential deceptive enough for many wealthy folks that they continue to fund companies that, on average, will only return a portion of their investment over time.   Are Startups , on average, a bad investment?

Viva Las Vegas for Casino Profits

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This Hotel Interactive article offers some great data about the Las Vegas Casino scene in terms of economic impact. As you’d think it’s a staggering cash flow – some 2.1 billion profit on 24 billion in revenues from the 274 properties in Nevada reporting more than a million in profit for the year.

Here are some notable items from this report:

Gaming accounts for 49% percent of total revenue = $11.8 billion.
Rooms = 20% = $5 billion
Food = 14%
Average revenue per casino hotel resort was $88 million (!).
Casinos paid $928 million in state gambling tax and license fees (!).

Slot machines accounted for 67% of gaming revenue.
Poker accounts for only 1.4 percent of gaming revenue.

The Las Vegas Strip: $14.9 billion revenues and profits of $1.25 billion.
Downtown Las Vegas: $1.2 billion in revenue and a profit of $140.6 million.

Hey, here’s my brief Las Vegas History based on the PBS show about Las Vegas.

Las Vegas Blog