Digital intuition

A computer program that can outplay humans in the abstract game of Go will redefine our relationship with machines.


Napoleon had it and so did Charles Darwin. Tennis champion Roger Federer has it in spades. The dictionary defines intuition as knowledge obtained without conscious reasoning. It is decision-making based on apparently instinctual responses; thinking without thinking.

Intuition is a very human skill, or so we like to think. Or, more accurately, so we liked to think. In what could prove to be a landmark moment for artificial intelligence, scientists announce this week that they have created an intuitive computer. The machine acts according to its programming, but it also chooses what to do on the basis of something — knowledge, experience or a combination of the two — that its programmers cannot predict or fully explain. And, in the limited tests carried out so far, the computer has proved that it can make these intuitive decisions much more effectively than the most skilled humans can. The machines are not just on the rise, they have nudged ahead

Read the editorial in Nature

41 of the trickiest questions Google will ask you in a job interview

Google has a reputation for asking difficult brain-teaser questions that challenge how you act under pressure.

Most of them require you to think quantitatively and broadly, and test the way you tackle problems on the spot.

Google probably switches up its questions over time, but career website Glassdoor provides a glimpse of the types of brain-stumping puzzles Google has asked in the past.

Not all of Google's tricky questions are necessarily meant to be brain teasers - some of them sound simple, but turn out to be difficult to answer in a concise way.

See them

Indian engineers develop ‘Light’ which could make you stop using Google search

Tall claims are everywhere. But when I tried out the Lightapp, there was substance in the claim. Developed by Indian techies who’ve had experience working in the Bay Area, Lightapp recently came out of stealth at the Gennext Innovation Hub, an accelerator powered by Reliance Industries and Microsoft Ventures. Post launch, we got an email from Sanjeev Nair, a technologist and design guy with close to two decades of experience who had something interesting to show.

A part of the core team, Sanjeev is also one of the investors in Lightapp. And as the tag line suggests, the app is about ‘going beyond search’. Light is an answering engine built on NLP (Natural Language Processing), machine learning and man-machine hybrid technologies. What does that mean? Well, you ask Light a question and it gives you an answer as if you’re having a conversation with it. No links, no searching for answers, the ‘bot’ does it all for you. Yes, there have been efforts on similar lines (including Google), and globally corporates have dedicated teams to work on these technologies making impressive headway, but Light has something noteworthy to show.

I tried out the app and the results were pretty impressive. I tried out a variety of questions, all of which would require different kinds of processing and the responses were accurate. Right from factual information like ‘what is the temperature right now?’ to ‘how deep do roots grow?’ to ‘what is the meaning of life?’, the app had answers that were satisfactory.

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Top 10 Clever Google Search Tricks

Google is a more powerful tool than most people realize. You can get much more refined searches with Google's built-in tools, advanced operators, and third-party extensions. You can also use it for some pretty cool stuff if you know the right tricks. Here are 10 of our favorite lesser known tricks and features.

Use Google to Search Certain Sites

Find Product Names, Recipes, and More with Reverse Image Search

Get "Wildcard" Suggestions Through Autocomplete

Find Free Downloads of Any Type

Discover Alternatives to Popular Sites, Apps, and Products

Access Google Cache Directly from the Search Bar

Bypass Paywalls, Blocked Sites, and More with a Google Proxy

Search for People on Google Images

Get More Precise Time-Based Search Results

Refine Your Search Terms with Advanced Operators

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20 Google Search Shortcuts to Hone Your Google-Fu

Hidden behind Google's search box are a slew of shortcuts leading to so-called "OneBox" results that provide awesome tools and display helpful information quickly and directly. You might think you know them all, but a few are more hidden than others.

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10 (More) Google Shortcuts to Hone Your Google-Fu

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10 Tricks That Will Boost Your Google Search Skills

Did you know Google searches can do a lot more than just provide you with a bunch of useful links? These ten tricks will help turn you into a Google ninja.

1. Find Phone Numbers

2. Calculator

3. Exchange Rate Calculator

4. Stocks

5. Track Flights

6. Dictionary

7. Weather

8. Search a Specific Site for a Word

9. Search for PDF Files

10. Do A Barrel Roll

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Undo! How Gmail Let’s You Unsend Emails:

Uh oh. You hit send. Was that really the way you spelled the boss’ name? And you CC’d how many people in the company on that email?

To rescue you from that nightmare scenario, Gmail has a great feature to make sure those emails never get opened. It’s called the Undo Send feature. When you set up your Gmail account to give you the option, you are given up to thirty seconds to hit “Undo” and make sure no one ever sees your email mistakes.

Here is how to set up your Gmail account to offer you the Undo Send option.

1. You’ll need to set up your account. Click the Settings icon (it’s the one with the gear on it) in the top right-hand corner. Select “Settings” from the menu.

2. Select the “Labs” tab from the menu. Google calls the Lab features “Some crazy experimental stuff.”

3. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the Labs options to find the options for “Undo Send.” Now click the button next to “Enable.” After you do that, go to the bottom of the page and hit “Save Changes.”

4. This next step is optional, but highly recommended. If you want to give yourself as much time as possible to unsend an email go back to the gear icon and click settings again. On that first page, the “General” settings, scroll down to “Undo Send.” Select “30” seconds from the dropdown menu. Now scroll to the bottom and save your changes.

5. Now every time you send an email, the dialog box that appears at the top of your Gmail screen that says your email has been sent will also offer you the option “Undo.” All you have to do is press it when you have an email you regret sending. Don’t hesitate! You only have the option to Undo for 30 seconds at most. After that your email is set in stone.

See the full post with illstrations

Google Wants to Store Your Genome

Google Wants to Store Your Genome: For $25 a year, Google will keep a copy of any genome in the cloud.Genome data on millions of people would lead to new medical discoveries and improved diagnostics. Google is approaching hospitals and universities with a new pitch. Have genomes? Store them with us. The search giant’s first product for the DNA age is Google Genomics, a cloud computing service that it launched last March but went mostly unnoticed amid a barrage of high profile R&D announcements from Google, like one late last month about a far-fetched plan to battle cancer with nanoparticles (see “Can Google Use Nanoparticles to Search for Cancer?”). Google Genomics could prove more significant than any of these moonshots. Connecting and comparing genomes by the thousands, and soon by the millions, is what’s going to propel medical discoveries for the next decade. The question of who will store the data is already a point of growing competition between Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.

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The future of search

Google gets down to doing what it knows best - developing new tech - to change your life

At a well-built six feet, Nikesh Arora commands a presence when he walks into a room. Much of it is also because he is the man tasked with bringing in revenues of more than $50 billion - that is more than Punjab's annual income - at Google, the Internet giant.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt thinks it is business as usual. "Google's aspiration," he says, "is to be your assistant, to know what you don't know and to get that information to you in whatever way it is quickest."

Read the Business Today Cover Story

Interview with Eric Schmidt -- Google, Executive Chairman

Interview with Nikesh Arora, Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer at Google

Video: Google Compute Engine -- Introduction & Technical Details

GCE: Introduction: This one hour video provides an into to "Google Compute Engine" GCE, a new virtual machine based cloud technology for large scale data processing and analytics workloads. GCE allows the world to leverage the scalability and power of Google's data centers to run computationally intensive jobs.

Watch the video

Access the Session presentation in pdf format

GCE: Technical Details: This one hour+ video session will provide an in depth overview of Google Compute Engine. Google Compute provides Virtual Machines optimized for large scale data processing and analytics. We will dive into the core concepts, API, unique features and architectural best practices in the context of concrete examples.

Watch the video

Access the Session presentation in pdf format

240 Years After the Crash: Lessons from the English East India Company

During this month of August, 240 years ago, one of the most influential corporations in world history was forced to beg the English Parliament for an emergency loan to prevent its imminent collapse. But many Britons hated the company not for high prices, low quality, or poor service, but for the humanitarian crisis they had caused halfway around the world.

The English East India Company is a topic that does not get much play in American history textbooks. Not many Americans could tell you what it did aside from selling the tea that was dumped into Boston Harbor. But the history of the Company, why is succeeded and why it failed, can help even an investor in the twenty-first century spot both opportunity and red flags in a company before or after investing.

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Google’s Zeitgeist Events

Google’s Zeitgeist events are a series of intimate gatherings of top global thinkers and leaders. ZeitgeistMinds is a collection of inspiring videos from these events.

Dive in to explore the ideas that affect our social, economic, political and cultural surroundings. Hear perspectives from industry pioneers and statespeople, renowned writers and bloggers, scientists and artists, activists and musicians. Learn from progressive minds, and discuss topics that influence the world around us.

Listen. Join in. Be part of the Zeitgeist.

View & Listen

Google Data Center Now Open for a Virtual Tour

Google is usually very secretive about its data centers due to user privacy concerns, but is now showing their IT infrastructure off in an online virtual tour.

Google usually keeps the contents of its data centers closed to prying eyes to protect the security of user data, and that's meant that few outsiders have seen the innards of Google's technological wonders.

That changed literally overnight when Google unveiled a new virtual tour of the insides of its data centers so it could show off some of the technological innovations and highlights that help run its global operations.

Read the story and visit the links

Geeky Google Doodles: PAC-MAN

Geeky Google Doodles: PAC-MAN

Ever since New Year's Day 2000, Google has made itself known for altering its logo in remembrance of a holiday, anniversary, or other special day. In this gallery, one can take a look at 30 of the most memorable, geeky Google Doodles from 2009 and so far.

In what is possibly the most popular Google Doogle ever, Google created a fully functioning PAC-MAN game to replace its logo on May 21, 2010 in celebration of PAC-MAN's 30th anniversary. Google has left a working version for us to play. Simply click "Insert Coin" and you're on your way.

play pac-man

It’s a Beautiful Day in the Fiberhood: Google Fiber Kansas City Videos

Here's a round up of Google Fiber themed videos -- today Google announced Kansas City will get Google Fiber. Check out the parody videos here, too. Fun with fiber! Also check out Google's rendition of what your Internet speed times 100 looks like.

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Introducing the Knowledge Graph

When you search, you’re not just looking for a webpage. You’re looking to get answers, understand concepts and explore.

The next frontier in search is to understand real-world things and the relationships among them. So we're building a Knowledge Graph: a huge collection of the people, places and things in the world and how they're connected to one another.

This is how we’ll be able to tell if your search for “mercury” refers to the planet or the chemical element--and also how we can get you smarter answers to jump start your discovery.

Visit to know more

The Google Science Fair

The Google Science Fair is an online science competition seeking curious minds from the four corners of the globe. Anybody and everybody between 13 and 18 can enter. All you need is an idea. A world-class science fair calls for world-class prizes. They include once-in-a-lifetime experiences like a scientific trip to the Galapagos Islands with National Geographic Explorer, unique scholarships and real-life work opportunities in iconic science centers of excellence like CERN in Switzerland. There’s also a special Science in Action prize, sponsored by Scientific American. There will be 90 regional finalists who will each receive a Google Chromebook*. 15 finalists, selected from these regional finalists, will be flown to Mountain View California for a chance to compete to become a finalist winner in three (13-14, 15-16, 17-18) age categories. One of the 3 finalists winners will be selected as the Grand Prize winner which includes: A National Geographic Expedition, Google scholarship worth $50,000, +++ All entries must be submitted by 1 April 2012.

See the details

Watch the 1 hr 6m video of 2011 final event in its entirety, with an introduction by Eric Schmidt, hosted by Mariette DiChristina of Scientific American, with appearances and talks from Vint Cerf, Dean Kamen and Tierney Thys.

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

In this paper, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page as students of Stanford University, present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google was designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages was made available at http://google.stanford.edu/

Read the full paper.