Another “Intelligent Search” Skyrocket

In the On Search series, I wrote a piece called Intelligence that explained why intelligent search is hard, but that it is so eagerly desired that there are predictable flurries of excitement every so often over the next, uh, pretender. This time, Cringely has been sucked in. Well, not entirely, he loads up with caveats too, but it’s a little sad to see one of the really big-name writers point to such tattered hype. Earth to Bob: the problem with AI isn’t that the “A” part isn’t fast enough, it’s that we don’t understand the “I” part. I wonder what it takes for some obscure little company peddling a dream that has been around the track so many times to get airtime with this guy? Cringely needs to pull up his game a bit: in the last couple of weeks, he was the only person on the planet to conclude that the Sun-Microsoft deal was somehow bad for the Java Desktop System; not that he actually advanced any arguments on the subject, just proclaimed it. The people in Redmond are smarter than Bob and I’m pretty sure that the deal isn’t making them worry less about this.