Google Wins Rights to Aussie Algorithm

rcbutcher writes to tell us the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that Google has just acquired the rights to a brand new text search algorithm invented by a University of NSW student. From the article: "Orion works as an add-on to existing search engines to improve the relevance of search and won praise from Microsoft founder Bill Gates last year. [...] Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the key word so the user can pick the most relevant."

What about Slashdot?

Something like this could be used to check if the content of first posts is related to the story or not. ;-P

His future is so bright, he's got to wear shades!

Google just bought your script before Microsoft could do more than praise it; I would suggest you duck before the chair hits the fan.

Re:His future is so bright, he's got to wear shade

Google just bought your script before Microsoft could do more than praise it; I would suggest you duck before the chair hits the fan.

Actually, Gates praised the algorithm in order to fake Google into wasting millions of dollars on it. The algorithm is actually punk ass shit.

You don't think that Gates would say anything publicly before buying all the rights if the algorithm were any good, do you? :)
 

Re:His future is so bright, he's got to wear shade

Do you even know what you're talking about? Have you even tried it? It works really well. Do a search for Foster's and the first result is beer, followed by sheila, shrimp on the barbie, and g'day mate. I don't know how we ever survived before having an Aussie algorithm.

Challengin other search engines

The algorithm is a problem-solving computational procedure and is the building block for all search engines like those operated by Google and Yahoo.

No it's not. Otherwise they would've implemented it already. How can something be a building block if the thing they're referring to isn't built on it?

Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word.

Duh. Welcome to Google in the 1990's.

The results to the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts, giving the searcher the relevant information without having to go to the website - although there is still that option.

What was stopping Google from creating something like this before? Is it just me or is this being hyped just a bit?

...won praise from Microsoft founder Bill Gates last year.

That it's, enough said. Hope you got a receipt for that Google.

Re:Challengin other search engines

It's entirely possible that the media sources we trust to be accurate are actually riddled with errors.

::Clasps hand over mouth in mock shock and horror::

-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]

Re:Challengin other search engines

Ask anyone who has been written about in the media. I was personally amazed at:
a) the amount of inaccuracies in the media
b) the amount we trust the media to tell unbiased or factual truth

Aussies are gonna getcha now!

How dare you try to pull the rug out from another of our cause célèbres? See, Google is a big, famous, mostly American company, and they've bought an Australian product! That makes all Aussies famous and important and sopheeeeesteeecated! No, really, it does. Honestly. So stop trying to ruin this for us you ungrateful fuckwit, and keep saying nice things about the United States of Australia, because our egos need it.

Now watch this post get modded straight to hell by my infuriated countrymen.

Hello World!

Man, all that time wasted writing simple "hello world" programs and number guessing games, and I could have been doing something like this.

*gives himself an uppercut*

What's with the headline?

Since when are "wins" and "buys" interchangable verbs?

Re:What's with the headline?

I agree. When eBay sends me an email saying "Congratulations, you have Won!", I read "Congratulations, you're prepared to pay more for this item than anyone else in the entire world". I suppose they phrase it nicely just to stop you from feeling like a loser.

Re:What's with the headline?

Well, they'll be upset to learn that I've discovered the secret to always winning on eBay. You simply enter a bunch of nines into the number field. Whammo! Winner every time! Hehehehe...suckers...

Very fishy

First, it is funny how various countries are putting a nationalistic spin on it. Israeli newspapers are focusing on the fact that the inventor is an Israeli. Australian newspapers are focusing on the fact that he is Australian. Only the national newspapers are spinning this as "revolutionary technology."

Second, the description sounds alot like what Google and others do already.

Third, buying a single algorithm is not generally such a big deal. Maybe it is reasonably valuable. Maybe so valuable that Google paid ten million dollars for it. In the big scheme of things, that's chump change for them and for their competitors.

The whole thing sounds overhyped to me.

Re:Very fishy

First, it is funny how various countries are putting a nationalistic spin on it. Israeli newspapers are focusing on the fact that the inventor is an Israeli. Australian newspapers are focusing on the fact that he is Australian. Only the national newspapers are spinning this as "revolutionary technology."

Yes, but bought by an American company. USA! USA! USA!

Re:Very fishy

I'm just extremely proud that the inventor was a man.

Re:Very fishy

I'm just extremely proud that the inventor was a man.

So I guess we know what he did with the money then.

Re:Very fishy

Australia is a multi-cultural nation, we claim anyone as ours if they are here at the time of doing something interesting.

Except Russel Crowe, he turned out to be complete knob and we don't want him anymore, so now he's a New Zealander again.

WOW

I know English majors aren't the most technologically gifted, but COME ON!!:

The algorithm, or search engine tool, is called Orion.

Way to reduce CS to the web. And that was possibly the most UN-enlightening article I've EVER read. Does anyone have a link to something with more meat??

Google + Thesaurus?

So, this is basically Google looking up the search phrases in a thesaurus and then returning hits on those words too? Probably would help if I read the article first, I imagine, but I wouldn't want to seem atypical :>

Intellectual ownership

From TFA:
While Mr Allon is the key person behind Orion, the university retains ownership of the intellectual property as it was developed within the university's research facilities.

Bleh, sometimes I think I shouldn't leave my house for fear of coming up with an idea where someone else can lay claim to it. It could be that he needed the computational resources of the university to develop the algorithm, but it's easily imaginable that the university could be laying claim to it when he was working without any real assistance.

I know that there are a number of issues around this (where do you draw the line?), but still - in general writing algorithms is a creative act, so they should belong to the creator(s), if it is even possible to own an algorithm.

Holy Hypes, Batman!

Where are the peer-reviewed publications by Allon? Where are the journal articles? Where are the papers in SIGIR, ICML, KDD, etc.?

Do a Google Scholar [google.com] search for publications in CS/EE, and you get... nothing.

His own web page is bare, with no details.

A Science Daily [sciencedaily.com] article from September 2005 (yeah, over 6 months ago) mentions this "algorithm", but scan details.

I highly doubt the novelty/effectiveness of this "algorithm" if it has been patented before being published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Re:Holy Hypes, Batman!

I highly doubt the novelty/effectiveness of this "algorithm" if it has been patented before being published in a peer-reviewed journal.
In nearly every country other than the US, publication disqualifies an invention from patent eligibility.

Business as usual

Yet again. Micro$oft shows they can't innovate and only buy others innovation with their monopolistically acquired money.

Oh, wait...

I can understand why Google did this...

I read a book on the Google story a while back. What I remember is that when they came up with the algorithm, they worked with Stanford to pitch the algorithm to Altavista, Yahoo, etc. They wanted about $1 million for it but nobody wanted it. The Google guys just wanted money so they could scale up their experiment with more computers and storage but none of the big guys could see any money in search engines. Then at the prodding of the Stanford folks, they found a few angel investors and build up their company and the rest is history. So I guess the Google guys don't want to miss any opporunity and probably have a soft spot for these college students for when they were in the same place.

University of NSW?

Anyone else read it as NSFW? Heh.

Oooh you mean they replaced Boyer Moore? That's to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer-Moore_algorithm [wikipedia.org] Not a bad algorithm.

"Wins" ... or "buys"?

TSSIA

Smart use of your university time...

I would imagine there must be something smart or unique about this algorithm, or given the number of brains Google employ would have implemented it themselves rather than buying the guy out.

I like his initiative though. I wonder if he looked around at the current marketplace and thought "hmmm... so I gotta few years to research something... Google's looking pretty hot right now... why not build something I can sell them the end of it?". If he did, he's smarter than the average bear.

Actually I did a similar thing during my undergraduate degree in the early-mid 90s. I designed a very early back-end/database for a generic web-based online store. About 2 weeks into my project I got a call from a big record company (who apparently had heard about my work) and they bought it, despite it being mainly on paper at that point. I won't say who it was, I ended up working for them for a short time after I graduated, and as far as I'm aware, their site still uses the core of my code.

It's an Australian invention

if(SearchText=='crikey') rank++;

Re:It's an Australian invention

Actually, it's more complicated than that:

if ((GeolocateSourceIP=="USA") && (ResultIncludes("crikey")) rank++

Australians don't say "crikey!" (much - unless we're toying with the Seppos ;-); we don't drink Fosters (unfortunately, Australia's best-selling beer is VB, which is even worse...); and we don't all ride around in kangaroos (we have wallabies, which are smaller and easier to park...)

Truth be told, the typical Australian is less like Steve Irwin, and more like that other great Australian export - The Wiggles. Next time you meet an Australian sneak up behind them, make your hands into pistol-shapes, rotate them vertically in front of you, and scream "WAKE UP, JEFF!" in their ear. They'll appreciate it ;-)

Title makes it sound much worse than it is

I thought it was about Google taking his rights from something in court due to the "winning", but what they did was acquiring the rights, and he even works on Google now:

Mr Andrew Stead, the business development manager at UNSW's NewSouth Innovations agency confirmed that Mr Allon left Australia six weeks ago and was now working at Google's headquarters at Mountain View, California.

Mr Stead said the move was not a secondment; Mr Allon's move was permanent.

Since it sounds like he was a student immediately before, it sounds like a step up in his career, and the only possibly evil thing I ended up seeing here was that Google is taking on a tech with Microsoft praise. ;-)

Other algorithms have been around...

The guy must have invented something absolutely bloody amazing. I mean, it's not like similar technology hasn't been around for ages now (check contributions to the TREC (http://trec.nist.gov/ [nist.gov]) conferences. Some of the submissions reach a level of sophistication Google can only dream of. And the algorithms are published.

So, what's up with this "Orion" thing? What insanely great insight into language processing can a CS student have that whole teams of experts still didn't get?

Re:Other algorithms have been around...

What insanely great insight into language processing can a CS student have that whole teams of experts still didn't get?

Patent office.
 

new alg vs. clusty

How are the results of this algorithm any different than the results of search engines like clusty [clusty.com]?

What is it really?

From the very sketchy descriptions, my guess is that this algorithm doesn't really have to do with search per se, but rather with figuring out what the multiple meanings or contexts associated with a term are. So, if I search for "American Revolution" the interesting thing would be to realize that that is a broad and many-faceted topic. So the cool thing for this algorithm to do would be for it to look at the search results which are returned, and then realize that some of the more specific aspects of the results might be:

          battles political aspects leadership England and King George III

and so on, and then let you choose which of these was the best fit for what you are looking for, and show you the results which are related to that aspect, and then repeat this process on that subset, so that if you chose "political aspects", it might further offer you

          Federalist papers Continental Congress actions etc.

The difficult problem, which perhaps Allon has solved, but as far as I know noone else has, is automating figuring out of these aspects.

Does anyone know of a more substantive description than the rehashed stuff which appears in 100 news sites..? A paper, a patent application, anything? Do we know where Bill Gates learned about it?

Slashbot summary:

"Google gains control of software patent."

"Micro$oft said to have wanted to use technique"

"Software patents declared good by slashbots."

New patent

A method by which, when a search engine user enters keywords into the interface, the search engine first looks up all alphabetical words longer than four characters in the wikipedia entry of each individual keyword with a length of four characters or more. It then proceeds to sort all found pages weighted by the incidence of these associated wikipedia words. Alternatively, the search engine every so often sucks the wikipedia dry of its keywords per entry and uses the accumulated wisdom to weigh sorting of pages found by keywords given by the user (search engine caching). Additionally, other resources besides the wikipedia (dictionary.com etc.) may be used to find relevant associations for a keyword. Additionally, by using 'tagging', or click-incidence by the search engine user, the relevance of these alternate resources may be weighed in itself. Additionally, resources may be added on a dynamic basis by search engine users, where they start at the bottom of the list.

The actual patent applications

I don't have access to the patent applications as they were only filed late last year, but the the two relevant patents are:

Australian Application Number 2005906358
Applicant(s) Newsouth Innovations Pty Ltd
Inventor(s) Allon, Ori
Martin, Eric
Title A method and a system for facilitating ranking of textual information
Status Filed
Filing Date 16 November 2005
Date of Patent 16 November 2005

Patent Application Type Provisional
Australian Application Number 2005905853
Applicant(s) Newsouth Innovations Pty Ltd
Inventor(s) Allon, Ori
Martin, Eric
Title Methods and systems for facilitating ranking of an advertisement
Status Filed
Filing Date 20 October 2005
Date of Patent 20 October 2005

This makes me suspect that there is more to this story the SMH is reporting!

Sounds like the title of a book ...

The latest high-tech action thriller from Robert Ludlum, The Australian Algorithm, is sure to delight readers with its well-researched look into the depths of the Internet search business, and the egos and conflicts that drive it. Recommended.

- ScrewMaster's Books in Review



Hello? Mr. Ludlum? Uh ... Yes I did say ... no, I ... look, it was a JOKE, okay? A JOKE!

Thesaurus?

Wouldn't it be simpler and more reliable to just lookup the keyword in a thesaurus?

Wanna demo? This technology has been around

for a while. The idea of sifting through search results to find related topics has been done by at least a few companies (including mine), and these products predate this tech (which was officially anounced in Sep. 2005) so I don't think Google will be able to defend a US Patent on this.

If you want a demo of a product (mine, natch) that's been around in one from or another since 2004, check out Q-Phrase's ConceptQ Pro [q-phrase.com] product. A free version which does just web search will be coming soon.

Here's a screenshot [q-phrase.com] of a search of the entire 9/11 report, broken down into relevant topics.

Introsducing Erroirz

As good as this algorithm sounds, it can be given enough false information to act like an idiot (or MSN Search). Imagine the fun if it thought pop-tarts were used in Vegas for poker cards and casino chips came in three flavors: strawberry, chocolate and smokey bacon.

NSW

A Not Safe for Work University... I'd like to join that!

Re:World Domination Algorithm

Hmm, so let me get this straight, google just hired another computer scientist who has developed an amazing algorithm to search the web. Thats putting to many eggs in one basket, I think. Lets hope they don't "break."

Yes, because the opportunity cost [wikipedia.org] associated with hiring this guy are so great that Google won't be able to do anything else.
 

Re:World Domination Algorithm

Mod parent up.

This is more likely than not the motiviation behind this move.

Even if google doesn't need this guy, you can be assured that Yahoo, Microsoft, and co. DO need this guy, and the fact that he may very well indeed positively contribute to Google's search algorithms makes it a good choice for google to hire this guy. In short, the risks associated with not hiring him are far too great.

I for one am glad that Google is finally acquring technologies relating to their original business model rather than their string of oddball acquisitions lately...

Re:Rights

Besides, the summary says they didn't hire him; they bought the rights to use an algorithm he invented.

No, the summary doesn't say that "they didn't hire him." In any event, the article states:

Mr Andrew Stead, the business development manager at UNSW's NewSouth Innovations agency confirmed that Mr Allon left Australia six weeks ago and was now working at Google's headquarters at Mountain View, California.

Re:Mine is better

OOPS:
for (i = 0; i &gt texts.length; i++) if (texts[i].indexof(search) > -1) return texts[i];

Re:Mine is better

Let me guess. You work for MS?

(OT) Paragraphs!!

For fuck's sake. I try not to be a grammar nazi, but I can't even conceive of trying to read something like that. Here's a tip: If your name isn't James Joyce (yes I said yes I will yes) or e e cummings (anyone lived in a pretty how town), try to follow some basic conventions of style and usage.

Re:Uh.....

Yes... you can. Now put your helmet back on.

Re:Uh.....

You can buy algorithms?

Yeah, but real geeks win them in gameplay.

KFG

Re:Uh.....

Now THAT would be an interesting premise for a cyberpunk short story. "Got a new quantum prime sieve. Tears down the hardest ICE in a matter of nanos. What you got?" "The best Starcraft AI ever." "I'm not a fan of the old school." "Hmm... in that case, a steganographic algorithm so powerful it can hide fourty-five terabytes in your rand() seed?" "Oh, that sounds good" "6D Pong, default settings?" "Your algorithmical distinctiveness will be added to my own."

Re:Uh.....

I couldn't tell if your fictional geeks were comparing penis sizes, wagering, or negotiating a marriage.

Re:Serious Undertakings by Google

Yes yes, very clever [pakin.org] of you.

Re:Patented Too!

Hey, you can get a patent on someone clicking on a link, provided they do it for a 'special' reason. Actually having something that does something useful - no problem, its more money for the patent office anyway.

Personally I'm working on my algorithm for recognising pages selling stuff and only returning them WHEN I'M LOOKING TO BUY STUFF. It would do more for Google than this algorithm and personally I could do with a few million.

Re:University of Not Safe for Work?

Really? Here I thought OP meant the Northumberland Services For Women http://nsfw.ca/ [nsfw.ca]

Re:Why buy an "algorithm"?

If it has been patented, you do need rights to implement and use it.

Re:Serious Undertakings by Google

It took a little while for me to catch on, but a pattern did seem to develop. That anyone could take this serious as it relates to Google suggests either as one who would latch on to anything anti-Google, or one who did not read far enough into the diatribe.

For example, substitute the phrase "the Bush Administration" or "the administration" or Hussain, or "the regime" and the ranting makes equal sense. There is no depth to the rambling though the buzz words had more meaning when put into a political perspective.

if this is the work of a random "rant" generator then kudos to the programmer for effort. I would pair down the paragraph size and work to make the ranting more poignant. I would have almost seen this as modded funny or interesting, but in the end it took up space and said nothing. Maybe a future political speach writer in the making.