Why Google Image Search is falling short

How do you assign thoughts, and ideas to images?

You all must have heard about a picture being equal to a thousand words.
If so, when Google Image search relies on just the keywords in the site for retrieving images, how accurate can it be? Though I am aware that some experiments are going on in the information retrieval community and search engine giants, for mapping common thoughts and ideas to images, I want a tool coming out of it soon.

The task of finding an image that matches the emotion in your mind, even though accurately mapped to English words, is quite tedious because not many think alike. And, Google uses a pagerank method for ranking, and the image you badly wanted could very well have been out of the index due to hundreds of reasons.

At this point, I am forced to learn graphics designing, explore myself for an artist within, and bring the idea into an image and upload for common use. Though that might sound like an excellent business/utilitarian initiative, the fact is that it is very tedious for a small spark of idea.

Having said all that, I am feeling more in need to pursue my Neural Network Mapping campaign I started in college. That would give me the position of being on top of the problem, rather than the problem being on my head. Here begins my reunion with the Information Retrieval side of Vivek. ( ah those days were so intellectually fulfilling )

Going through google labs...

I was just going through Google Labs looking out for any new additions in it.

I tried out the Image Swirl feature which is quite old now,but would be nice if implemented in the main Google Image search.

The next one which caught my attention was Indic Music Search which allows you to search and play Indian movie songs(currently only Hindi is supported) online. This again was released some time back,but I never remembered to actually try it out, until now.

There were loads of great looking apps,but all were for android, and as I don't own any android devices or haven't started developing in it, I skipped them. But the apps were innovative and made me wish I had an android phone to try it out. One of them is Google Goggles, which allows you to search using photos captured in your phone camera. It is available for IPhone4 and Android.It seemed quite similar to my classmate at MEC , Sandeep's academic project.


Afterwards, all the apps were quite old, heard of, or boring in nature. I just tried out one, named People Hopper, which basically is an app which shows the transformation path between the profile pics of any two friends, through your Orkut Account. It will be added as an app to your profile and you can drag and drop your friends (any 2 including urself) and the app will calculate and show the transformations that convert one photo to match the other. It was quite crappy for the pics I tried and looked surreal. Anyway nice concept..someone might believe its actually accurate.

Thats it for time being..will be back with more updates on my view of this myriad world of technologies..

Google Instant

So, its out.

Google releases a major change to the UI after the autocomplete and spell-suggest addons, which is called Google Instant. It supposedly borrows its name from the Instant Coffee ,which is quite popular in the corporate world and Instant Noodles, which is very popular in Japan and among couch potatoes/geeks/kids. Google's innovations are also like these - Fresh, fun-filled and utilitarian.

With the release of this change, you don't need to press the Search Button for any of your queries any more. Google will search while you type by combining an old technique called 'Incremental Search' designed by an engineer Amit Patel, and Google's now popular Autocomplete feature. When you start typing itself, Google predicts a list of possible queries and in addition, brings you the results of the top ranked query among that.

Its kinda weird after all these years of conventional search that we have been doing. But it helps out a lot when you are not so sure about the query that you need to give in , to get to the data you want. You can straight-away decide whether you need to type the whole story , or just the first few words are enough. This definitely is an improvement, and not a revolution, because all it does is add to the overall user experience and reduce search time.

I was just watching the Live Streaming of its release and talk by the famous Marissa Mayer (VP of Search ,Google) and the product managers and technical leads behind this quirky innovation, that is Google Instant. They showed some really cool search examples in the video, and I was excited to watch it all. But a tweeple friend of my Chetan Gole also tweeted out the additional capability of Google Instant to be morally conscious. It won't support any kind of swear words or profanities in its predictive real time searches. Wow!!

Currently, this feature is released on in the US version of the page, and will be rolled out for signed in users in other versions like Spain,Russia,UK, France and Italy. It will be available on the IE8,Firefox, Safari and of course Chrome.So keep your eyes peeled out for its release to Indian version and the default search page of your browser as well.

The new age of search is here...

Revisiting the wave

I was reminded of the Google service called 'Wave' when I saw the article: Joined the wave.
So I just went over there to see whether it looks any different from what it used to be. I had read some tweets and news about Google discontinuing the development on wave ,some time back.So, I wasn't really expecting anything above the slow and unresponsive windows and cluttered boxes which is my memory of Google Wave.

Though the activities and presence (or lack of) of online contacts in wave supported by expectations, the interface and its responsiveness looked better than it used to. Maybe if, initially itself, they had released it the way it is now, it wouldn't have had this sudden death. Considering the hype that surrounded it during its beta release time, it has been a real nail in the coffin for the internet giant, that is Google. With this and some more failures and partially successful ventures, Google has been gaining on the negative opinions scale, competing with the likes of Microsoft and Facebook.

Coming back to wave, the thing that caught my attention was the 6 boxes under "Start a New Wave", namely 'Blank Wave','Discussion','Task Tracking','Meeting','Document' and 'Brainstorming'. As there weren't any contacts online, I was not interested in any of these, except 'Task tracking' and 'Brainstorming'.

But, each of them turned out be something like a custom template from Google Docs.Brainstorming had this extra feature of flash component that allows drawing. So, for collaborative brainstorming, this might have been a good tool. I liked that.

Speaking of the task tracker, I being a person of low brain retentivity, tend to use task trackers and notes extensively. And hence, I find such tools very useful and amusing. Here also, the availability, of categorization of tasks based on priority caught my attention. Apart from that, it is not interesting at all. I would any day prefer a proper task planner software on my desktop, or for that matter, even gmail's task list over this.


Overall, I felt good that Google stopped wasting time on this. Maybe they will enhance something else worth using. It was rightly discontinued, as it is a big failure from Google. So waving goodbye to Google Wave again..adios

Joined the wave

Hi
I too joined the wave, that is Google wave today.(Thanks to Cyriac and Ribu for sending me one invite each in an interval of two minutes :) ).
Initially I found it highly confusing and nonsensical. I had already got a few opinions of the wave being just a hype and it being a bore. But I was more interested in spending my afternoon trying out the new tool. I didn't find it to be something of interest after spending 10 minutes in it and went back to my other tasks.
Then my friend Anil popped up in Wave and gave me tips on how to use the features and we even played a couple of games collaboratively. That caught my interest and I started getting comfortable with the wave concept and interface. To my opinion both are flawed(yes I do mean it). Anyways, as with all Google products, its in development mode..(this is in Preview which is buggier than beta).
I found it to be very useful for collaborative activities,and having group chats like we have for our class group. Its great when there are a lot of people involved at the same time. Other than that, currently I don't see much of a use for this.
The extensions are cool and it alone made me stay for a while in the site.
I found the interface highly cluttered and difficult to handle.I was using my room-mate's laptop,making it even harder to move around all those windows. Also,I found out that in Chrome, the interface gets stuck when you select two waves one after the other. The number of unread wavelets in a wave also tend to change and it returns to normal only when the "Sync completed" message appears on top left.In a system with 256mb ram running Chrome, I got an error asking to stop an unresponsive script about 5 times in 10 minutes. Even while I type this, my wave interface is not responding. :D
I haven't tried Wave in FF,so I don't know if its some problem with Chrome (what an irony ).

Anyway for its initial stage,it does provide something different from the various other 'socializing' tools available out there. I wonder if it would just be another site you open as soon as you fire up your browser...Lets wait and see whether this tool becomes a communication wave or would require us to wave it goodbye...depending upon how much more value Google is able to add to its much hyped new product...happy waving..

Obama brings in change

So thats it, Barack Hussein Obama has been sworn in as the 44th President of the US of A. I watched the speech yesterday evening,and it was very interesting. It's not Obama's policies or what he is going to do or not do that I am gonna write about..its about his association with new technologies.

That is the change that Obama seems to have brought, and with good effects as well. From the time he began his campaign, the utilization of the web facilities made him pretty popular among the people who support and embrace such facilities of the internet. The facilities he used included Social Networking sites,blogs,dedicated sites for reaching out to supporters,forums,and even channels in Youtube. His attachment to the blackberry too was in the news for sometime.

Though America is far ahead of us in terms of technology penetration and quality of service, unlike us, there are many there who do not trust/understand such technologies, in spite of being well educated. Many people who use these technologies do not understand the reasoning behind them(not technical), and hence can't think beyond what is provided to them.

With his intelligent campaign, I feel Obama has reached out to the vast population online and even proved a point or two to the people who believed that web and its facilities cannot be used for uniting people for a common cause. The use of such technologies also meant, many of his supporters got a chance to understand and appreciate the underlying technology and its capability to be used in innovative ways.

I was surprised and even amused by the amount of effort that has been put by his campaign teams in utilizing the resources of the web and high end technologies for the campaigning purpose.Even after being elected, his public activities were religiously followed by groups and forums consisting of his ardent supporters and blogs were constantly buzzing with his whereabouts. Even tech bloggers found enough material to write about this man.

The inaugural function was streamed using Microsoft Silverlight technology, which made quite a news. Read M$ press article But later, to assist Linux and MAC users, it was made available via Moonlight technology. There are also many sites that cover the function completely as streaming video as well as pictures. The Official Presidential Inaugural Committee too has online resource to guide supporters who wished to come to DC for the event. It contains maps,contact informations and guidebooks.

It seems Microsoft and Google are stealing the limelight in Obama's victory as 'technology partners'. Here is an article on CNN-Microsoft collaborative Photosynth that covered the Inaugural ceremony. Here is something about Google's youtube.

That's all for now folks..lets hope the change is positive ...

Google Introduces Video Chat

Wow..google comes up new feature.just saw..lets see if its good enough..hm..clicked the link and reached the site..
As usual.the beautiful page that google always sports...with the same type of buttons( of chrome and lively fame) and owww..hm..they have kept that same thing over these three products...crap...

It's free and installs in seconds
System requirements: Windows XP or later

Why only windows xp...?why not Linux..why don't they ever release products for Linux anymore..I would love to see chrome get more add-ons and a Linux version...they are using the beta excuse over the line..
Hm..and ya ok..whatever..lets see what they have to offer...clicked 'Learn More'
and hehe...and what awaits is...ads from Buy.com for web cams and also a link to Google's product search for webcams..so this is just an ad gimmick..not focused on the technology it seems..

Feel lil bit sad after learning Pagerank for IR today( easy paper..:) )....hm..have a stall at a Free software national conference at CUSAT tomorrow..got some work also..

Tech tek tek

Well I cudn't think of any other title..so just put it in...
Got to tell abt the urge to pursue tech with pure interest of an engineer(for me an ideal engineer in my dreams would be the technician working late into night into his new machine with great enthusiasm).
Though i have been quite unable to emulate that enthusiasm always...i really am optimistic about it.
Perl seems so synonymous with a placement in Yahoo! that it doesn't strike a chord with me.
C on the other hand seems attractive as it seems to be able surprise me on a weekly basis due to its power and reach.
Today by chance I looked up the Google Summer of Code thing..wish I had put some effort into one of the many fields and got the unique chance for an engineer to get a project to live and die on...hehe
Surely such events are gonna boost the upcoming techies ....more nice projects,improvements await the industry.

Google as usual seems to be going far ahead in all terms...just check Google Code
OpenSocial and Android are two promising fields for development.
There are also tonnes of other APIs provided..what more can an enthusiastic young engineer ask for...but I(the glorified so called techie) dont find all this to be enuf...hehe...tats coz while reading the details of a project,sooner or later I wud come upon some roadblock,most probably a new language or concept..gosh i wish i knew them too....hm..i seem to be wishing for a lot of things..its a good sign....hope the best of the better dreams await me...