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I always assumed that the personal-agent style work (ie a bot that is there to help you wade through the morass of information) would be a personal computation - local to you, probably configured and augmented by you.

Yet Google is trying to do it for everyone - and honestly does not seem to be doing a bad job.

So what is the advantages of the old idea of an almost-AI assisstant working for me when BFG (Big Friendly Google) does it?



> So what is the advantages of the old idea of an almost-AI assisstant working for me when BFG (Big Friendly Google) does it?

Privacy. Yacy[1] looks like a good start but it has miles to go before it can reach the same usability as popular services.

[1] http://yacy.net/en/


> honestly does not seem to be doing a bad job.

Is there any difference between the goals of an individual (person, company) vs. the average? Is information a competitive advantage? Today we provide unpaid feedback to improve private algorithms, tomorrow ..?

Edit: downvoters, what is a rhetorical question?


One is derived from algorithmic matching, the other is explicit opt-in by the user.

> local to you, probably configured and augmented by you.


Even if you opt-in to a centralized black box algo, it's not easy to audit the resulting advice.

There is a big difference between explicit goals and the reverse-engineering of intent, e.g. from search history.

We need both explicit goals and auditable algos.




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