Official Google Blog: The future of search
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Saved by 20 people (-4 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-09-11
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The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the 10 years since Google's founding. I
Highlighted by raavipl
s impact on people's lives around the world in the 10 years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next 10 years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked 10 of our top experts this very question, and over the next three weeks we will pre
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Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it
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why couldn’t I do these searches right then, when I needed to
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needs to be more mobile
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voice and natural language search.
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picture
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Further, why should a search be words at all? Why can’t I enter my query as a picture of the birds overhead and have the search engine identify what kind of bird it is? Why can’t I capture a snippet of audio and have the search engine identify and analyze it (a song or a stream of conversation) and tell me any relevant information about it? Services that do parts of that are available today, but not in an easy-to-use, integrated way.
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In the next 10 years, we will see radical advances in modes of search: mobile devices offering us easier search, Internet capabilities deployed in more devices, and different ways of entering and expressing your queries by voice, natural language, picture, or song, just to name a few. It’s clear that while keyword-based searching is incredibly powerful, it’s also incredibly limiting. These new modes will be one of the most sweeping changes in search.
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We’re not sure yet, but we do know that the one thing that the search experience can’t be - especially in the face of the online media explosion we’re currently experiencing - is stagnant
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how will it be better
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understand more about you
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One answer is clear: search engines of the future will be better in part because they will understand more about you, the individual user. Of course, you will be in control of your personal information, and whatever personal information the search engine uses will be with your permission and will be transparent to you. But even with the most rudimentary user information, search engines can and will provide drastically better search results. Maybe the search engines of the future will know where you are located, maybe they will know what you know already or what you learned earlier today, or maybe they will fully understand your preferences because you have chosen to share that information with us. We aren't sure which personal signals will be most valuable, but we're investing in research and experimentation on personalized search now because we think this will be very important later.
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location is one potentially useful facet of personalized information
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Another element of personalization is social context. Who am I friends with, and how do I relate to them? How can I harness their knowledge more efficiently
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Algorithmic analysis of the user’s social graph to further refine a query or disambiguate it could prove very useful in the future
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searches where actually asking a friend helps
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A quick email to a doctor friend, and I was back on the right track - equipped with the right spelling and his explanation of the difference
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friend-augmented" search
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investing in machine translation
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familiar with 80-20 problems
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We’re all familiar with 80-20 problems, where the last 20% of the solution is 80% of the work. Search is a 90-10 problem. Today, we have a 90% solution: I could answer all of my unanswered Saturday questions, not ideally or easily, but I could get it done with today’s search tool. (If you’re curious, the answers are below.) However, that remaining 10% of the problem really represents 90% (in fact, more than 90%) of the work. Coming up with elegant, fitting and relevant solutions to meet the challenges of mobility, modes, media, personalization, location, socialization, and language will take decades. Search is a science that will develop and advance over hundreds of years. Think of it like biology and physics in the 1500s or 1600s: it’s a new science where we make big and exciting breakthroughs all the time. However, it could be a hundred years or more before we have microscopes and an understanding of the proverbial molecules and atoms of search. Just like biology and physics several hundred years ago, the biggest advances are yet to come. That’s what makes the field of Internet search so exciting.
Highlighted by takuya514
We’re all familiar with 80-20 problems, where the last 20% of the solution is 80% of the work. Search is a 90-10 problem. Today, we have a 90% solution: I could answer all of my unanswered Saturday questions, not ideally or easily, but I could get it done with today’s search tool. (If you’re curious, the answers are below.) However, that remaining 10% of the problem really represents 90% (in fact, more than 90%) of the work. Coming up with elegant, fitting and relevant solutions to meet the challenges of mobility, modes, media, personalization, location, socialization, and language will take decades. Search is a science that will develop and advance over hundreds of years. Think of it like biology and physics in the 1500s or 1600s: it’s a new science where we make big and exciting breakthroughs all the time. However, it could be a hundred years or more before we have microscopes and an understanding of the proverbial molecules and atoms of search. Just like biology and physics several hundred years ago, the biggest advances are yet to come. That’s what makes the field of Internet search so exciting.
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