Saturday, September 5, 2009

Eric Schmidt About Google’s Long Term Goals

Google’s Eric Schmidt on the topic of the long term goals of Google search tells Techcrunch:

So I don’t know how to characterize the next 10 years except to say that we’ll get to the point - the long-term goal is to be able to give you one answer, which is exactly the right answer over time. Okay, you know, the question I’ll ask today, how many Americans have - what percentage of Americans have passports? [Google’s] answer was a site, which was somebody who had attempted to answer that question and had multiple answers. It’s quite interesting actually to read... So you go to a very good definitive site. And what I’d like to do is to get to the point where we could read his site and then summarize what it says, and answer the question... Along with the citation and so forth and so on.

One thing that is noteworthy about the direct article-type answer with citations approach (especially for webmasters) is that it may not lead away to other sites as fast as with a normal SERP, because your question may already have been answered. For now, before this issue pops up, we still have quite a way to go to reach this level of software understanding humans (Eric: “Sergey argues that the correct thing to do is to just connect it [Google search, I suppose] straight to your brain”). Back in 2006, one of Google’s biggest goals – according to an internal company paper – was to have the world’s top AI research laboratory... not sure where they’d position themselves now.

[Thanks Yakov and Jérôme!]

Eric Schmidt About Google ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2+2)

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