Can you see the future ?

Amit Singhal: Senior Vice President (Google Search)
…SXSW conference 2013, Austin Texas USA…

“having humanity’s knowledge on the Web is not enough, you have to understand it”

“search challenges: knowledge graph, speech recognition and natural language”

 “…the perfect search engine should know
exactly what you need and give you what you want”

“our dream is to become the star trek computer”

“people have completely come to expect search engines to work and
the questions they have been asking have gotten harder and harder”

“…voice is clearly crucial for the future”

“…a star trek computer you could type or talk
and connect to would be crucial to (search) success”

 …all good and well, but why can we easily generate millions
of semantically equivalent search query replacements while
Google still cannot return semantically equivalent result groupings?

If I ask meaning wise the same thing – just with different
keywords – shouldn’t my return results be semantically consistent?

Why do we have to laboriously guess, replace and aggregate
synonyms as keyword alternatives to improve returned search results?

“….I would really like to find the web meeting discussion where the
participants discussed help and assistance to Indian farmers to help ease
yield decreases and with immediate concern funds and finance issues on the ground….”

AND

 “…I would actually like to get the web talk where the
participants discussed support to Indian farmers to improve yield
net gains and with the critical thought of money issues on the ground…”

 

 Not one of the top ten Google return
results for my first query is replicated in even the top
hundred results of my semantically equivalent second search query…

 

We dream of talking to Star Trek computers but are still
stuck for optimisation in the “caveman-speak”
three word input search query universe…

 

Beam me up Gatfol…