This article is from the public number:Silver Star (ID:guixingren123), author: Doutzen, title figure from: Oriental IC.
As a text worker, I deal with search engines every day.
For example, when writing Facebook’s earnings news, Google can tell me about its real-time stock price, market value, recent highs and lows, and other very useful information.
But actually, there is another tool that is better than Google, which is Wolfram Alpha. It goes a step further than Google and can directly list the knowledge I might need in a structured way.
The simplest example: My home bandwidth is 75Mbps (9.375MB/s), how long does it take to download a 100GB file? I can ask directly in natural language. Wolfram Alpha will not only tell me the answer, but also write the formula:
It is not only a mathematical tool, but also a good knowledge aggregation tool. For example, the recent movie “The Clown” is very hot. If I want to write an article about it, I can find a lot of details on Wolfram Alpha, including not limited to video information, rankings and box office.
Exactly, Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine. Its official definition is called “Computed Knowledge Engine”, which can be used to answer questions that are not publicly available, but can be calculated. Moreover, it uses a structured approach to presenting answers, rather than listing links one by one like a search engine.
Next, introduce the protagonist of today’s article: Magi, a little-known tool among my friends in the technology circle in recent days.
Magi(URL https://magi.com) also looks like a search engine:
But once you play it, you will find that it is very different from all the search engines you have in mind.
When I used it to search for the term “易烊千玺”, I got the following result.
First of all, the answer provides several key descriptions of Yi Qian Qian, such as “members of TFBOYS” and “post-00 national idol representatives”. Then, it lists almost all of the important attributes of the owner of the entry, including the date of his birth, the film and television productions he participated in, and the published music albums.
The structured presentation of the answer is quite similar to Wolfram Alpha.
Even the support of thousands of paper cranes (easy to call thousands of fans) has been answered
More interestingly, magi.com also replied to several pros and cons of Yi Qian, such as his nickname, his name and his pets.
Sometimes, MaGi can also give some results that I can’t help but…
Enter the “Evangelion”. The description of the answer includes “the famous model worker in the industry”…
After searching for Hideo Kojima, I am also drunk in the “experts” in the answer…
Next search for Fu Jian Yibo.
Maybe because I have been drafting most of my career, magi.com tells me that Fu Jian’s hobby is “drawing comics…”
Of course, most of the time magi.com gives an answer that is more reliable.
The answers to the search will be in green, yellow and red to indicate their credibility from high to low; on the right side of the answer will provide a few links, you can use the mouse to cross them. See, the answer is which one/some specific sources to learn from:
You will notice that in the result of magi.com, the answer is just below, and the link goes to the right, which is completely contrary to the user interface of the mainstream search engine.
This is the biggest difference between Magi and the mainstream search engine: the link is not the result, the answer is.
This is because Magi is not a search engine (although there are some search engine features). It is actually a machine learning-based knowledge engine that can retrieve and extract natural language text from any field and extract the knowledge from it to form structured data.
It’s a bit simpler:
We all know that there is a lot of text-based information on the Internet, which contains a lot of knowledge. However, computers do not understand most of the information on the Internet, because this information is often not in the form of “sex: male”, “nationality: China”, but in the form of natural language.
For example, “The height of the Eiffel Tower” is an entry-level problem, because people have already sorted out the correct answers, written on Wikipedia and travel sites; but want to know “the second elevator line of the Eiffel Tower has How long is it, it is difficult to find accurate information on the search engine. This is because very few people will record these details in a structured way on the Internet.
This is what Magi wants to solve: Extract knowledge from plain text in the open world and make it parsable, searchable, and traceable.
Magi from the Chinese team Peak Labs, founder Ji Yichao is also well known in the developer community. In 2011, during his time at Peking University High School, he completed the development of the mammoth browser iOS. The following year, he completed Rasgueado in just two days, the first to support the swipe gesture to control the cursor position.iOS input method
In 2012, Ji Yichao founded his own company and continued to promote browser and input method projects. Currently, Peak Labs focuses on the Magi project, focusing on the technologies behind it and the development of related commercial products.
中:季逸超
Peak Labs has no plans to compare Magi with mainstream search engines like Google and Baidu. Make Magi a “search engine” mainly to give the public a chance to experience the technology behind it and feel the value it can provide.
Even so, it looks like the search engine magi.com, the strength is not to be underestimated. In fact, for this exemplary product, Peak Labs did not choose a smart way to crawl results from other search engines, but instead developed an Internet search engine from scratch.
“The summary of our results is longer than the average search engine, yes, we deliberately. This is enough to prove that our results are impossible to come from other search engines,” Ji Yichao wrote on the official website.
Depending on user input questions, keywords, and expressions, magi.com can present answers in different ways—the specific presentation also demonstrates the capabilities of the Magi system.
For example, enter “Taxis Software Company”, the Magi system can call all the mobile phones it knows, and list them in the answer in a “collection” manner.
And on Baidu, the results are as follows. It can be seen that Baidu’s knowledge map also provides similar results, but it seems that it has not been updated in four or five years:
For example, if you enter “octagonal”, the Magi system will find that the two keywords are actually the same thing, and it will give the answer in the form of “assertion”.
As shown below, magi.com tells me that the octagonal and aniseed are “near-meaning items” and are the relationship of “also known as” and “also called”.
The Magi system can learn 24 hours a day. Its timeliness is also pretty good. Peak Labs claims knowledge in real-time news, Magi takes only 5 minutes to master, and can also adopt new sources of information for cross-validation for automatic error correction.
If you stay on the home page of magi.com for a while, you can see the link it is currently learning:
In addition to the self-developed network-wide search engine, Peak Labs has developed a focus-based neural information extraction system that does not rely on a non-interface browser-based distributed crawling system(Crawler MagiBot), and a natural language pipeline that supports a mix of more than 170 languages.
These four are combined to be the full picture of the Magi system.
As an EVA powder, I have to interrupt it here: Magi and its four subsystems, all named from the Evangelion (EVA itself From the Bible and other Western religious classics), and there are also eggs in the name:
Magi(Three Sages, Supercomputers with Multiple Systems)
Search Engine Ramiel(Ray Angel,)
Neural Information Extraction System Ireul(Horror Angel, with Learning and Evolution)
Natural Language Processing Pipeline Arael(Bird Angel)
The reptile program Matarael(Angel of the Rain, looks like a spider)