Google's vision for the future is artificial intelligence, Google's Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and co-founder Larry Page announced at the Zeitgeist conference for Google's European partners just outside of London last week.
Google's vision - A search engine that knows exactly what you are looking for, that can understand the question you are asking even better than you do, and find exactly the right information for you, instantly.
Larry Page:
"The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world. It would understand everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly."
It all sounds a bit 'I Robot' to me but, at what was rather cosily called a 'fireside chat at the end of the day', Larry said that one of the things he had learned since Google launched eight years ago was that technology can change faster than expected and that AI could be a reality within only a few years.
Ideally, to be intelligent and to serve results that are relevant to your query a search engine would have to:
- Know about you
- Know about the world
Google is learning about the user through the masses of data collection from various sources (Google Toolbar, Gmail, Google Co-op, etc) that are then being applied to personalised search to give the most relevant results to the particular user's preferences.
Learning about the world? - I think this one could prove to be a bit tricky.
Bigmouth will be keeping a close eye on this one - just in case the computers take control! But also because search engine optimisation depends on keeping one step ahead.
