In continuing celebration of Google’s tenth anniversary, the company is calling on its top scientist to outline what the future holds over the next decade in terms of both search technology and the internet as a whole.  Beyond many things moving to the “clouds,” Google plans to add a human element to its search technology to enhance the experience further. 

The element of moving software to the Web will have a great impact on the way Google indexes and presents its data, according to a post on the Official Google Blog.  By 2019, parallel-processing computer clusters will be 50 to 100 times more powerful in most respects. Computer programs, more of them being web-based, will evolve to take advantage of this newfound power, and Internet usage will also grow- more people online, doing more things, using more advanced and responsive applications. By any metric, the “cloud” of computational resources and online data and content will grow very rapidly for a long time.

By having more and more devices interacting with the Web and the “cloud” so to speak, there’ll be a never-ending source of data flowing to and from the cloud.  The increasing number and diversity of interactions will not only direct more information to the cloud, they will also provide valuable information on how people and systems think and react.  This is where Google comes in to leverage the new found information to provide smarter search results.

Google provides an excellent insight into just how they could accomplish this; “we could train our systems to discern not only the characters or place names in a YouTube video or a book, for example, but also to recognize the plot or the symbolism. The potential result would be a kind of conceptual search: “Find me a story with an exciting chase scene and a happy ending.” As systems are allowed to learn from interactions at an individual level, they can provide results customized to an individual’s situational needs: where they are located, what time of day it is, what they are doing. And translation and multi-modal systems will also be feasible, so people speaking one language can seamlessly interact with people and information in other languages.

With so many product launches, acquisitions, and advertising news- it’s good to hear what Google thinks about the future of its core business: search.  The best advancement in search would obviously be to move away from the simple “keyword” nature to find results, and move more toward a “situational” algorithm.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 8:03 pm under Google, Internet.

Read more entries by Justin Montgomery.
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