Ever since Facebook unveiled its Graph Search last month, pundits have opined that it’s everything from a “killer app” that will crush companies ranging from Google to Yelp to a powerful new ad targeting technology to nothing more than a glorified extension of the “like.” In reality, it is none of these things.
What Facebook Graph search really signifies is that it is entering the race to marry natural language processing with big data. The list is getting to be a long one and now includes:
Apple Siri: Probably the simplest (but most popular) version is Apple’s Siri which is available on iPhones and iPads. It’s still a bit buggy, but works reasonably well if you speak slowly and clearly.
Microsoft Kinect: While best known as a gesture interface for the Xbox, Kinect also takes voice commands in natural language. Microsoft has now integrated Kinect with Windows 8 and, with a research budget of nearly $10 billion – most of it dedicated to cloud services – we can expect Kinect to become an impressive marriage of voice, gesture and data.
Google Now: Without much fanfare, Google has integrated its natural language processing platform directly into its searchbox. Its Google Now service aims to not only search, but actually predict what you might want to know.
IBM Watson: While it became famous for beating humans in the game show Jeopardy!, IBM’s Watson is being geared up to tackle industries ranging from medicine to finance.
So what’s really notable about Facebook Graph Search isn’t that it’s so new and different, but that Facebook is willing to throw their hat in the ring against well entrenched rivals that are far better capitalized (Google spent a $1 billion on infrastructure just last quarter!). This truly is the future of computing.
While the marriage of big data and natural language processing is exciting, it’s also frightening, because Facebook Graph Search and the other platforms aren’t just search algorithms, they are learning algorithms.
Read more at Forbes
