Google On The Future Of Search

Google executives have been writing articles on the future of search, and a new piece by vice president of engineering Alfred Spector and research scientist Franz Och has speculated on what search might be like as the clock ticks over to 2019.

They see a much larger database of information, as well as far more devices with Internet capability, as well as the dominance of cloud computing.

"Computer systems will have greater opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. They will get smarter, gleaning relationships between objects, nuances, intentions, meanings, and other deep conceptual information."

While search would really remain just that, its possibilities would increase exponentially:

"We could train our systems to discern not only the characters or place names in a YouTube video or a book, for example, but also to recognize the plot or the symbolism. The potential result would be a kind of conceptual search: ‘Find me a story with an exciting chase scene and a happy ending’."

And that future might be closer than we think. According to Vnunet, Google has just announced the public beta of an audio indexing tool. That will let you search political speeches by crawling text used in the speech.