> You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG-411 service. Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model … that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search. [Google shows Microsoft how to connect the dots « counternotions](http://counternotions.com/2008/12/03/411/).

Man, Google is on the ball. One of my favorite quotes about them comes from Adam Bosworth (coincidentally one of the favorite CS thinkers). He said Google uses Bayesian algorithms the way other companies use the if statement. Even if you don’t know what those are, I’m sure you can guess that Bayesian algorithms are more complex than if. They’re working at such a higher level of abstraction than other companies it’s laughable. MS collects data from the web to make search better, Google collects data from the web to make everything they do better.