DOES GOOGLE NEED TO APPLY AI TO ITS SEARCH RESULTS? I frequently check Google News to catch up on what’s been happening around the world in the areas of business and technology that Drives & Controls covers. It’s impressive how quickly Google can return results to such a query – but there are also too many frustrations when using the process. For example, I often search for news items on “robotics”. As you would expect, most of the results that Google News returns are to do with recent developments involving humanoids, cobots, industrial pick-and-place systems, and the like. But too often, these searches will produce news items about footballers who have performed “robotically” in a match, or actors whose performances have been judged to be too wooden – or “robotic”. Then there are the news stories about “robot” vacuum cleaners or lawnmowers. There is no doubt that some of these appliances are very good at carrying out their tasks, no doubt aided by some form of electronics. But they are not robots, by any definition (other than those dreamed up by enthusiastic marketing departments). They cannot be reprogrammed to carry out other tasks. They will always be vacuum cleaners or lawnmowers. Then there is Google’s concept of what constitutes news. It is not unusual for the search results to include items that were first published six months ago, or sometimes even older. Surely if you are searching for news, you’d expect all of the items to be a few days old, at most? There is so much happening in the worlds of industrial automation and robotics, that plenty of items on these topics will have been published on the Web in the past day or so. But perhaps the most frustrating aspect of carrying out a Google News search is that there is no apparent logic to the order in which the results are presented – and no way for the user to specify their preferences. Whatever algorithms Google is using don’t always place the most important or newest items at the top of the list. Obviously what constitutes “most important” is subjective, but often it seems that trivial items find their way to the top of the list. Surely it would be possible to request for the results to be presented so that the most recent stories are at the top? But this option does not seem to exist. I don’t know whether the apparently random presentation of results is a ploy to keep visitors on the Google site longer, but it certainly is annoying. It seems to me that the Google News results would benefit from the judicious application of artificial intelligence – something that Google should know a thing or two about. Sometimes the results appear to have been “curated” so that stories on similar topics are grouped together. This is presumably done automatically. It would be just one step further to use AI to ensure that the results are presented in a useful way, and that searching for news items on robotics does not produce references to poor acting or sportsmanship, or to domestic appliances. Tony Sacks, Editor n COMMENT device-design www.escate OU n-to-manufacturing ec.com/medicalTNOW! & ecycle acturing Design, manuf lif www.escatec.com e solutions built
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