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Is Google's Future: Star Trek?
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet UK has an interview with Google's CTO, Craig Silverstein, and he's got some pretty cool visions: "When search grows up, it will look like Star Trek: you talk into the air ("Computer! What's the situation down on the planet?") and the computer processes your question, figures out its context, figures out what response you're looking for, searches a giant database in who-knows-how-many languages, translates/analyses/summarises all the results, and presents them back to you in a pleasant voice." Now that's the search engine I want." The NLP required for this is far off, but it sure will be cool when we get there.
"Computer, Tea, Earl Grey, Hot."
Trolling is a art,
Read heads?
I read the internet for the articles.
...downhill!
I think it is now as good as it'll ever be.
The threat won't come from Microsoft, though they have money, intention and technologies they just don't have the credibility and trustworthiness. It won't be overture, they're clearly not into that mindset. It won't be IBM, at least not directly.
It will start, first of all, with Google's IPO.
The future as i see it will be the commoditization of web searching through distributed/grid computing and resource-sharing, and distributed/p2p-based open source search systems. It will be fueled by dissatisfaction with Google as a commercial entity. It will be helped by globalization, anti-american sentiment worldwide and nations wanting to handle their own informational destiny. And it'll be facitilitated by enhanced always-on broadband (many residential places already offer 54mbps) and cheap storage (a 320gb hard-drive is already on my shopping list for this month, for my personal use).
I don't see a reason other than time and technology why p2p won't evolve to handle websearching, I'm sure soon someone will figure out a way to harness the network and introduce the paradigm shift that napster did in the late nineties, i still remember what it was like before napster, maybe some form of implicit anonymous rating or whatever. At least then, when i search for a chinese restaurant, i'm likely to get an answer that is in my neighbourhood.