Googling At The Future
With former customers such as Microsoft and Yahoo looking to knock Google off the top of the lucrative search market, the company has opted to go on the offensive rather than retreat into lock-down and cost-cutting.
Google product manager Marissa Mayer recently said that search is still in its infancy--how do you think it will look when it's 'grown up'? 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/analyzes/summarizes all the results, and presents them back to you in a pleasant voice. I think this technology is about, oh, 300 years off.
Just getting the computer to understand your question, much less the context in which it's being asked, is way beyond the state of the art in computer science right now.
Full story:
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5086946.html