Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has said the company wants to create “the perfect search engine” but he hasn’t said what he thinks that would be like. Luckily one of his employees, Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search & User Experience, has. Read on for a vision of speech recognising, concept unpicking future search…
We told you earlier in the week that Google is preparing to roll out “Google Caffeine“, its faster, more real-time search algorithm but what else does the future hold for search?
Asked by IDG News what she though a perfect search engine would look like, Mayer said:
“It would understand speech, questions, phrases, what entities you’re talking about, concepts. It would be able to search all the world’s information, different ideas and concepts, and bring them back to you in a presentation that was really informative and coherent.”
Mayer answered criticisms of Google’s ‘basic’ look by talking about the search engine firm’s culture of constant tweaks and changes:
“We have two, three, five changes every week that are visible to the end-user in the UI but we don’t publicise ranking changes. We are making changes to our ranking algorithm at the rate of two per day. Some of our competitors haven’t made any changes to their ranking function for some time.”
Mayer didn’t name those “competitors” but she’s likely to be taking a shot at Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Bing search engine which some claim is gaining ground on Google.
She also revealed that Google’s approach to various types of search is constantly changing too. Asked if Google’s universal search will “always be a work in progress”, Mayer says: “We have a local team, an image team and a product search team. They’re all looking at how we can do a better job ranking and triggering this content.”
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