Tag Archives: Search

2020 posts that never were

Occasionally, when a thought gets bubbled up in my brain, I pop open Twitter, and tweet the thought. In some cases, the fleeting idea seems larger than a tweet, so I open up WordPress, and start a post. I may save it and come back to add content to the post. I’ll come back to the post, and say to myself, what was I thinking, and don’t pursue publishing post. Here’s the list of blog posts that I drafted this year, but decided for one reason or another, I wouldn’t post it.

LITTLE KNOWN FACTS ABOUT MICROSOFT BING

THE ANATOMY OF A TWILIO STUDIO PROGRAMMABLE VOICE WORKFLOW

LOW COST, PLATFORM AGNOSTIC, BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, PROLIFIC REPORTING TOOL

RADICAL TRANSFORMATION OF K-12 EDUCATION SYLLABUS

AFTER THE PANDEMIC: GETTING PAST THE FEAR FROM SOCIAL DISTANCING

STOP WORDS: MODEL TRAINING

AI – BEST IN SHOW

BUY AND BUILD – DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONS

Using Google to Search Personal Data: Calendar, Gmail, Photos, and …

On June 16th, 2017,  post reviewed for relevant updates.

Reported by the Verge,  Google adds new Personal tab to search results to show Gmail and Photos content on May 26th.

Google seems to be rolling out a new feature in search results that adds a “Personal” tab to show content from [personal] private sources, like your Gmail account and Google Photos library. The addition of the tab was first reported by Search Engine Roundtable, which spotted the change earlier today.

I’ve been very vocal about a Google Federated Search, specifically across the user’s data sources, such as Gmail, Calendar, and Keep. Although, it doesn’t seem that Google has implemented Federated Search across all user, Google data sources yet, they’ve picked a few data sources, and started up the mountain.

It seems Google is rolling out this capability iteratively,  and as with Agile/Scrum, it’s to get user feedback, and take slices of deliverables.

Search Roundtable online news didn’t seem to indicate Google has publicly announced this effort, and is perhaps waiting for more sustenance, and more stick time.

As initially reported by Search Engine Roundtable,  the output of Gmail results appear in a single column text output with links to the content, in this case email.

Google Personal Results
Google Personal Search Results –  Gmail

It appears the sequence of the “Personal Search” output:

  • Agenda (Calendar)
  • Photos
  • Gmail

Each of the three app data sources displayed on the “Personal” search enables the user to drill down into the records displayed, e.g.specific email displayed.

Google Personal Search Calendar
Google Personal Search Results –  Calendar

 Group Permissions – Searching

Providing users the ability to search across varied Google repositories (shared calendars, photos, etc.) will enable both business teams, and families ( e.g. Apple’s family iCloud share) to collaborate and share more seamlessly.  At present Cloud Search part of G Suite by Google Cloud offers search across team/org digital assets:

Use the power of Google to search across your company’s content in G Suite. From Gmail and Drive to Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar, and more, Google Cloud Search answers your questions and delivers relevant suggestions to help you throughout the day.

 

Learn More? Google Help

Click here  to learn more on, “Search results from your Google products”  At this time, according to this Google post:

You can search for information from other Google products like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google+.


Dear Google [Search]  Product Owner,

I request Google Docs and Google Keep be in the next data sources to be enabled for the Personal search tab.

Best Regards,

Ian

 

Microsoft to Release AI Digital Agent SDK Integration with Visio and Deploy to Bing Search

Build and deploy a business AI Digital Assistant with the ease of building visio diagrams, or ‘Business Process Workflows’.  In addition, advanced Visio workflows offer external integration, enabling the workflow to retrieve information from external data sources; e.g. SAP CRM; Salesforce.

As a business, Digital Agent subscriber,  Microsoft Bing  search results will contain the business’ AI Digital Assistant created using Visio.  The ‘Chat’ link will invoke the business’ custom Digital Agent.  The Agent has the ability to answer business questions, or lead the user through “complex”, workflows.  For example, the user may ask if a particular store has an item in stock, and then place the order from the search results, with a ‘small’ transaction fee to the business. The Digital Assistant may be hosted with MSFT / Bing or an external server.  Applying the Digital Assistant to search results pushes the transaction to the surface of the stack.

Bing Chat
Bing Digital Chat Agent

Leveraging their existing technologies, Microsoft will leap into the custom AI digital assistant business using Visio to design business process workflows, and Bing for promotion placement, and visibility.  Microsoft can charge the business for the Digital Agent implementation and/or usage licensing.

  • The SDK for Visio that empowers the business user to build business process workflows with ease may have a low to no cost monthly licensing as a part of MSFT’s cloud pricing model.
  • Microsoft may charge the business a “per chat interaction”  fee model, either per chat, or bundles with discounts based on volume.
  • In addition, any revenue generated from the AI Digital Assistant, may be subject to transactional fees by Microsoft.

Why not use Microsoft’s Cortana, or Google’s AI Assistant?  Using a ‘white label’ version of an AI Assistant enables the user to interact with an agent of the search listed business, and that agent has business specific knowledge.  The ‘white label’ AI digital agent is also empowered to perform any automation processes integrated into the user defined, business workflows. Examples include:

  • basic knowledge such as store hours of operation
  • more complex assistance, such as walking a [perspective] client through a process such as “How to Sweat Copper Pipes”.  Many “how to” articles and videos do exist on the Internet already through blogs or youtube.    The AI digital assistant “curator of knowledge”  may ‘recommended’ existing content, or provide their own content.
  • Proprietary information can be disclosed in a narrative using the AI digital agent, e.g.  My order number is 123456B.  What is the status of my order?
  • Actions, such as employee referrals, e.g. I spoke with Kate Smith in the store, and she was a huge help finding what I needed.  I would like to recommend her.  E.g.2. I would like to re-order my ‘favorite’ shampoo with my details on file.  Frequent patrons may reorder a ‘named’ shopping cart.

Escalation to a human agent is also a feature.  When the business process workflow dictates, the user may escalate to a human in ‘real-time’, e.g. to a person’s smartphone.

Note: As of yet, Microsoft representatives have made no comment relating to this article.

Google Play and Search Integration: Maximized Revenue.

Simple Question.  I look at the simplified view of the Google Search home page, and see the most obvious thing missing is Google Play integration.  Yes, they have a Mobile tab, but even under More, there isn’t a section for Music.  Why wouldn’t Google have Google Play tab with / or without submenus to products on the Android OS.  Makes no sense to me.  It seems like a clear win for Google and the mobile platform.  From an anti-competitive standpoint, you could hide it in the   More menus, but I don’t think that may be necessary, if you believed that it may attract negative attention.  Why would’t you, at a minimum put Google Play market in the Google Search.  How much of the market share in technology is mobile?  This is insane to me that they haven’t linked Google Play to their main Search menus.  Even more fabulous, if they do a regular search, segregate, or at a minimum highlight the Google Play results integrated into all the other results, with the new description format when you look up a movie for example, and have a download Android application right from the search results, just as if Google Play was linked to Google Search. Yes, they do have a ‘Mobile’ menu tab, but that doesn’t touch the integration they can do.  It explicitly abstracted, where they would be able to drive more consumers to the Android markets, and revenues.  A short synopsis, Google has yet to truly integrate Android Mobile into its Search and that is missed revenue opportunity.

Artificial Intelligence: Tuning with a Content Index And Predictive Models

As I was reading an All Things Digital article, Artificial-Intelligence Professor Makes a Search App to Outsmart Siri, there was a statement that made:

“We memorize the dictionary to read the Library of Congress,” he said. “Siri is trying to memorize the Library of Congress.”

 

A tool more commonly used in the past, in books, at the end of a book, an index of where the words appeared in the book was noted with page numbers.  Classic rules engines is ‘data in a black box’, searchable within the context they appear. The more put into the black box, users can search on ‘rules’ or content, and in precedence, an action occurs, or the content that is searched appears.  If there are cross-references with an associated category or tag with ‘each line of data’ or ‘rule’ that will enable the Artificial Intelligence engine to be more efficient.  Therefore the correlations of ‘data to other data’ with similar or like tags enables an Artificial Intelligence will be more intelligent.  In theory, categorized or tagged content indexed to references of the data points should fine tune the engine.

An addition theory, allows for predictive models to produce refined searches, or rules.  You can make a predictive model, where the intelligence of the user actually refines the engine. The user can ask a question, and as they refine their question, a predictive model,  may allow for refined user output.  If a user is allowed to participate and tag data search output, the search output could be more granular, like a refined Business Intelligence drill down.  The output of a search, for example, can contain a title, brief summary, and tags that can be added or removed (by the user), which allows for a more robust search, and predictive model; however, you are relying on the user to a) not be malicious, and b) have understanding of what information he is search for within the data.  If web crawlers, or if the webmaster submits URLs with tags, the meta data tags of the page, the black box or Artificial Intelligence rules engine will, if properly submitted, or indexed, correlate the data.  To most people, this is AI or Search Engine 101.  Some people cheat, and add pages with false meta data tags because they want their site to appear in a higher order, or precedence and they may make more revenue with advertising dollars.

There are multiple ways around trying to cheat an Artificial Intelligence Content Index:

  • Hit Ratio: People searching on the same question over and over increase the ‘score’ ratio, thus pushing the false results downward on the list, or removing them entirely.
  • Enlist ‘quality’ users, who are known quantities, such as like Twitter ‘certifies’ certain users.  You may apply for ‘relatively’ unbiased, certification status, such as people who have reputations and certifications in the field, are qualified to ‘enhance’ tags, and improve upon your result outputs. e.g Professors, Statisticians,
  • Enlist users who will actually derive revenue, if their ‘hit ratio’ score delta increases exponentially some N number.  These tags are classified as unverified, however, the people are monetarily motivated to increase peoples’ probably of success to find what people are looking for when other users search the tags become qualified as the results of the tags attract users to their content.  If they are using, let’s say, a browser, which the search engine company owns, such as Chrome, a little plug in can appear and say, was this what you were looking to find, yes or no.