Where do you see Google Search 10 years from now?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from Austin, Texas. J-M-A-C or jmac asks, where do you see Google Search 10 years down the road? Woo, 10 years is a long time. I would expect Google to be maybe not sentient, maybe not artificially intelligent, but pretty far along the path of being a good assistant. So I can imagine a case in which you have multimodal input. So for example, maybe you have a phone, but you probably have an ear piece. You might have some Google glass. You have, at that point let’s say, augmented reality, not just a video overlay. A lot of great sensors. And so voice input, maybe one of these sub- whatever microphones, where you can make the sound. In theory, there could be a brain interface. And so you could be having a dialogue where some of it is audible and some of it is not. And so you’re saying– you’re having a long session. Right now when you type in stuff in Google, it’s key words. Well you ought to be able to have full voice recognition, and understand the context, and then have a session of multiple back and forths. Right now if you type in something and then you type in something after that, Google doesn’t really know that much about– you can’t refer to, well, what is the gross national product of this particular country? And then, what is it? And they wouldn’t know what it refers to. So you should be able to have stuff over many, many different sessions and track– not track, but basically be able to keep an idea of what you were talking about before so that if you change your query three seconds later, it’s able to figure out what you want. It ought to be able to synthesize information. So if I say, what are the top 10 companies in India by market cap? It ought to be able to go out and take multiple sources of information and figure out how to combine those together and fuse or synthesize that information. And it should really be able to handle difficult syntax. So moving up the chain towards not just data or knowledge, but analysis, towards wisdom. So I would hope you’d be able to do a lot of much more difficult tasks. So do a search and say, OK, now label the red blogs and the blue blogs, or something like that. Or label the people who are more pro this company or pro that company. And I think you should be able to tackle a lot more difficult tasks. It should also be an assistant in the sense that, if I’m going by the store, whether you want to call it a query or a query without a key word. But basically the fact that I’m nearby and I’ve got on my to-do list, hey it’s time to go pick up new cat food. Maybe I’d like Google to remind me of that as well. So you want it to be this sort of thing that is always helping you find the information you need. And if there’s information that you do need and maybe you didn’t think to ask for it, it should offer that in some useful, unobtrusive, not too jarring kind of way. So I think that would be fantastic. I would really love if Google Search had those sorts of characteristics. But we’ll see after a decade how much further Google can push Search. And if other people come and bring different types of competition, I think that’s going to be a fantastic thing for users overall.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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