[brianwhitman]

It is impossible to be objective about music. The point of his "WTF" test (not speaking for paul, but i do work with the guy) was to look at each song by each provider and ask "would most people agree this doesn't belong" erring very far on the generous inclusive side. You can definitely quibble about whether or not a particular song deserves a WTF mark but you can't argue that google's results are very terrible overall.

You couldn't do a test with other collections because the beta is very limited right now-- I can only think of a few people I know that have access. But I can concur that my results are as terrible as his were.

Yes, he works for EN (which he's very clear about) and yes it's a bit inside baseball showing a service that most people can't use (because they're not developers or customers) but you can scroll past our results & take it as a post titled "How is Apple so much better than Google at such a data driven task?"

(I would have given the lack of beatles on genius -24 too! I also found a couple EN clunkers that I'd give a WTF to, but I'm a notorious jerk for those things, ask anyone i work with :)

[kefs]

> you can scroll past our results & take it as a post titled "How is Apple so much better than Google at such a data driven task?"

Sure, but that wouldn't exactly be fair seeing as Genius is 3+ years mature, and Google Music+Instant Mix is in beta and less than a week old. OP even seems to think so...

> The last time I took a close look at iTunes Genius was 3 years ago. It was generating pretty poor recommendations.

[brianwhitman]

Fair, but a few points:

- Genius was much better than this when it launched. It's even better now, but it wasn't as bad back then as Instant Mix is today.

- You don't think google has more data about music than Apple did when it launched Genius? YouTube, Music Onebox, search traffic.

- (severe bias alert) EN's playlist APIs are the same excellent quality today as the day it launched (sept '10.) We're roughly 0.10% Google's size. We didn't need any warm up period.

[kefs]

I'll absolutely agree that Google Music Instant Mix is nowhere where it needs to be.. not even close, but I still can't shake the feeling that this review is more of a "Please Buy Us" post...

Just curious, in regard to the quality of EN since launching.. You guys we're clearly working on your algorithm for several years prior to launch[1] in late 2010.. That's sort of a warm-up period, no?

[1] second last paragraph of http://blogs.oracle.com/plamere/entry/genius_or_savant_syndr... from 2008

[DaveMebs]

You could call it a warm-up period, but the point is that period is pre-launch. I think it is fair to assume a team at Google worked on this project before launch as well. I don't know how long they did for, but they could have chosen to take the time to develop a better algorithm prior to launch as well. (Note: Google's historical use of the Beta tag, has made it effectively meaningless IMO.) For whatever reason they chose not to, and it's kind of surprising how poor a product they launched with.

Why do they think it is so important to get in this market ASAP? Perhaps under Page there is additional pressure to launch fast and early a la start-ups?

With that said, I have no idea if the quality of EN is as good as he claims.

[kefs]

It's quite a warm-up period.. Founded in 2005, first API went public in March 2008.

http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/27/first-machine-listening-api...

[brianwhitman]

Few things -- yes, we have been working on our stuff for a while. I've been doing it since 1999 at various grad schools and research labs, for example. Notice however we do not release things before they are good. I've spent 12 years working on this stuff and the state of the art simply wasn't ready until recently. First impressions are very important for music, if you lose the trust of your users it's hard to get it back.

Re: "warmup": My point was technologies like ours don't need a warm up period where users give us catalog and preference data. You can have great results without relying on that. Even better, we think.

Also, re: "please buy us" -- come by the office sometime and have some drinks and you'll see why we all found that comment pretty funny. Hopefully someone still reading this thread knows us well enough to +1 this. Come to a music hack day if you're not near boston.

(post-edit: davemebs -- our stuff is pretty easy to try for yourself if you're a developer. see developer.echonest.com . if not, wait a little bit for some consumer facing things. we're primarily developer-focused at the moment)

[shrikant]

I still can't shake the feeling that this review is more of a "Please Buy Us" post...

..so? I'd honestly like to see more of this sort of advertising.