In a front-page article in The New York Times on Thursday, I wrote that Web search is at its biggest crossroad since its invention, as users demand more from search and Google faces a broader array of rivals than ever.
Google, in response, is widening the scope of its ambition to include things that today’s Internet users might never even think to ask the search engine. Might Google someday help you, for instance, figure out how to get the $200 you need by next week, force your cat and your girlfriend’s dog to get along or tell you whether your husband is picking up the children from school
Those are three of the types of information needs that currently go unmet online, Google discovered in a study the company did. Thirty-six percent of people’s information needs are unmet, Google found, and most are things people need to get through the day. The rest of the time, when people do find what they need, 59 percent do it using Google, the study found.
But Google wants to be the place people go to satisfy all their information needs.
“Our goal here really is to satisfy as many information needs as possible,†said Patrick Riley, a search analysis engineer at Google. “There are always things we’re not able to do, but there are a lot of possibilities, with the type of data that people are willing to share, that we can really use to make people’s lives better.â€
To do the study, Google asked 150 volunteers to download a mobile app that pinged their phones at various times during the day to ask about their information needs at that moment, where they looked for the answer and whether they found it.
Their answers broke down into four categories. The first two Google already does well â€" answering simple questions (“when is Columbus Dayâ€) and more exploratory ones (“biography of Yves St. Laurent.â€) The other two are more challenging â€" tasks to complete (“does my local library have this book available for checkoutâ€) and complex issues that often do not have a single answer or an answer findable on the Web (“best path to deal with borderline personality disorder†or “is my wife picking the kids up from schoolâ€)
Even though cold, hard data is sacred at Google, the study shows why its engineers also have to rely on human interaction and intuition, Mr. Riley said.
And the results show that search is far from a solved problem, said Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president for search.
“Search is by no means perfect,†Mr. Singhal said. “If anything, it’s really, really imperfect, far away from the dream we want to build.â€
He envisions the company climbing a pyramid, he said, with data at the bottom, then information, then knowledge and finally wisdom.
What would the ancient philosophers think of finding wisdom in a search engine
