Author Archives: Michael Griffiths

The Wall Street Journal has a charming article on companies trying to fill gaps left by Google.

The company they feature is Quora, Inc. It’s founded by some very famous people – former CTO at Facebook – and was established in 2009. In March, some people invested at a pre-money valuation of $87.5 million (or: more than $10 million/employee, in a year. That’s some equity growth!). It’s particularly impressive since that was when the product was in private testing, before not even a business model but even traffic.

Quora had the bright idea to improve the Q&A space on the Internet. I mean, sure, there’s Yahoo! Answers; Metafilter and Amazon’s AskVille; Answerology, and a great deal more.

But, see, Quora has done something different:

The service allows people to pose or answer questions—working behind the scenes to route questions to the users who can best answer them.

Yes, it uses machine learning to route questions to capable users. This is a break from the current success-model, which is to treat it like a game – reward people with “points” of some kind.

And! Importantly! It’s a gap in Google’s product offerings! Google Answers was retired in 2006. Besides; Google Answers didn’t route questions to experts immediately – they had paid experts who had to trawl through the questions. It wasn’t scalable. Silly Google – no wonder they retired it!

Perhaps my sarcasm is come through a little strong.

Since 2007, Edward Chang – Director of Research, Google China – has been spearheading work in “classification and collaborative filtering.” What does that mean? Well, in 2007, Google launched Otvety (Russia) and Wenda (China) as trials for new applied of Google-researched technology in a product called “Knowledge Search.”

Edward Chang outlines this in a 2008 article outlining some of Google’s Data Management Projects:

Knowledge Search allows users to post questions and then matches experts to timely answer questions. The distinguishing feature of this product compared to competing products is that it offers online question classification, related-question recommendation, and topic-sensitive expert matching.

…. which sounds awfully similar to Quora. And it has the advantage of Google Researchers – experts in this small field of knowledge representation, question classification, and matching – working on it since 2007.

Given Quora’s lack of content, if Google simply ported the existing products over to the US, it would have a directly comparable product backed by the Google brand. And “directly comparable” is probably understating the technological advantage; you don’t put together something really sophisticated in a year, particularly if you’re busy trying to get a company together besides. Besides which, it’s not necessary; the marginal improvements in algorithms would be minuscule compared to spending their time building out the site.

So, if it wasn’t clear enough: I’m astonished at the market research which presented this as a “gap left by Google.” Yes, it certainly hasn’t been a priority; and yes, the current projects are research-orientated; and yes, it’s likely that it won’t become a priority. It’s entirely possible that Quora could become successful.

But that’s predicated on Google not doing anything with assets it already has. It’s certainly possible, and may even be rational – if Quora grows the market, then Google may decide to buy the product and (importantly) the people.

But beyond that, I’m astonished anyone would invest at a pre-money valuation of $87.5 million with this kind of situation, and absolutely no business model. And I quote:

Quora’s business model is currently unclear. Mr. D’Angelo, who became chief technology officer of Facebook in 2006 and left the company in 2008, said "if I had to guess, it would probably involve some kind of advertising at some point."

The defense, of course, is: “Find good people, let them do whatever; they’ll succeed.” And their team is, apparently, top-notch with a history of success.

I find it unconvincing.

via Mark Thoma, Claude Fisher has some interesting observations on crime in the United States:

Most notably:

Cities and neighborhoods that have received the largest influx of immigrants (including Mexican immigrants) have had — despite popular stereotypes to the contrary — the largest drops in criminal violence. (See, e.g., here and here.)

And in general, crime is declining:

Interesting stuff.

It also makes it difficult to explain why we have 25% of the world’s prison population in our borders, have a recidivism rate of 70-80%, and execute people by firing squad.

A couple of days ago, Steven Johnson provided a rousing defense of the death of “deep reading,” to borrow a phrase from Nicholas Carr’s new book.

Mr. Carr argues that the internet is destroying out ability to concentrate on things for long periods of time. This is a problem, because what has made our culture great (technologically speaking, at least), is the ability to concentrate for long periods of time on big ideas. Quantum gravity won’t solve itself, y’know.

Mr. Johnson’s rebuttal is simple:

“most of what we do during the day doesn’t require our full powers of concentration”

The problem with this argument, of course, is that it assumes that everything we do during the day is equally important. What if it’s precisely those things which require our full powers of concentration that are really important? In which case, arguing that the internet has made the unimportant things easier seems to be beside the point.

The second part of Mr. Johnson’s argument is that:

it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.

Mr. Johnson cites history. Now, I cannot deny that good ideas have seemed to emerge from crowded places or networks – but it is one thing to say that they emerge from networks, and quite another to say they are invented by networks.

Networks are good at communication. A large, crowded network can – in theory – communicate and compare a large number of ideas. Thus, we would expect good ideas to become popularized by networks.

That does not mean we expect them to be created by such networks.

Indeed, Mr. Johnson’s example – that aims to falsify Mr. Carr’s thesis – demonstrates precisely this point:

the sophistication and nuance of media commentary has grown dramatically over the last 15 years. Mr. Carr’s original essay, published in The Atlantic — along with Clay Shirky’s more optimistic account, which led to the book “Cognitive Surplus” — were intensely discussed throughout the Web when they first appeared as articles, and both books appear to be generating the same level of analysis and engagement in long form.

The ideas established in the longer pieces are being communicated and judged by the networks.

New ideas of similar weight are not being created.

The blogosphere has faced the accusation of “preying upon” the news media for years; it discusses, shares, and links to information gathered by the news media, but does not provide information of a comparable value on its own. With a few exceptions – who are more unaffiliated journalists than bloggers – bloggers excel at communicating information, but not at creating content.

Of course, all of this is a moot. While I agree with Mr. Carr in general, Mr. Johnson raises a very good point:

The intellectual tools for assessing the media, once the province of academics and professional critics, are now far more accessible to the masses

Namely, that the internet has opened the doors for anyone to write something.

However, the growth of blogs does not mean that “deep thinking” is declining. It just means more people are publishing content.

It could be that some people are inclined to think deeply, and some people are not; in which case, the internet may not alter that proportion; it may just increase the material published by those who do not think deeply. Those who communicate more than they create, who share more than they evaluate.

In which case, the internet would be a very good thing. It would not detract from the proportion of people doing the deep thinking, but it would increase the size and scope of the networks which share, evaluate, and popularize the results of deep thinking.

Unfortunately, it’s rather hard to tell which is the case..