Information is no longer enough: Google Ghana
By: Masahudu Ankiilu Kunateh
Centuries ago, it used to be that data was king: if you knew how to read, if you were a person who knew the most facts, you had a huge advantage in this world. The world is not designed that way anymore.
How many facts you know doesn’t matter. You can get as much facts and data as you want. Today’s it’s much more about how you make use of data. How do you connect between pieces of data to convert it into useful information, and then taking useful information and converting it into knowledge, and then ultimately wisdom?
By converting data into information, means organizing random facts out there into something meaningful. Search already does this – it takes the data out there on web pages, in videos, images, etc. and it organises it into relevant information.
Google Search wants to be able to take information and make it easily digestible, so you can more quickly decide what to do with that information.
Search started to do that with quick answers, but is still at the beginning stages of converting information into knowledge but search is the next best tool right now to make this progression from data to wisdom. More and more, you ask us a question, and it gives you the answer — not just links:
Search is rather inadequate at the moment. Search might give some result, but you can’t rely on it. Information is fine, but turning it into knowledge is mightier. Search is starting to scratch the surface of becoming a knowledge engine — and someday a wisdom engine.
WHAT IS A KNOWLEDGE ENGINE?
It means, effectively, teaching computers to think. Google needs to figure out precisely what a user might want to know, find it on the web and then package it so it can be easily digested by the user. At present, a Google search will undoubtedly find you a PhD dissertation on, for example, the expansion of the universe or the politician structure of the African Union. But it might deliver you a few hundred pages. This is a waste of valuable time, and we think we can do better – but it will take time.
The useful dissemination of knowledge would be for Google’s computers to work out instantaneously what those hundreds of pages of the PhD were actually suggesting and then synthesise it all into an easily understood but objective premise that takes into account the essential points and counterpoints.
By Google Ghana
WHAT IS A KNOWLEDGE ENGINE?
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