Something led me to happen across the following video from google I/O 2010 which gives a full expo (57 minutes) on their BigQuery and Prediction API’s. You can see they have made a lot of ground with ridiculous processing, claiming to be able to run SQL queries (or a derivative) on trillion’s of rows in seconds, essentially for free. BigQuery lets us, the general techy public do that, cool eh? Well yeah it is, but I cant help but ask the cynical, why? Data, I would presume is their goal, and if it’s yours to share and insensitive, BigQuery is probably a BigWin. Otherwise its often we find ourselves as technological problem solvers seeking services such as this, a way to fix X, a quicker way of processing Y, a ladder Z to climb fence A to get to B, which can lead us blind with determination down paths, data under arm, paths that are not as safe, sensitive or secure as we thought.
I look forward to someone tooling up the predictions API onto the lottery results.
2 Comments
As I was watching the video I was thinking the same thing; that they must be getting lots of data for FREE, and, even if they’re not going to publicly acknowledge the use of said data, they are probably going to benefit from up-to-date market decisions without any effort on their own part to reap what they sow. These guys are selling to us. Why would they benefit from saving us hundreds of computers worth of processing power? Though it IS incredible, I have to agree with you about them benefiting from the use of our data.
Yeah there is without doubt ulterior motives present, I do wonder about google as a company, finding an edge for a company born off of such a singular pursuit isn’t working for them. Its like “yeah we can do search…but what now”… and they pretty much seem like a deep pocketed lost puppy.
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