Google’s Future: What The Search Engine Will Look Like In Next 20 Years | Hacker News Reader

Google’s Future: What The Search Engine Will Look Like In Next 20 Years

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27 pointswebsagir29 comments

After Twenty years, Google won’t just provide you with what you are searching for but it could know what you desire before you know it yourself. That’s according to Marissa Mayer, Google’s 20th hire and the company’s vice president of maps and location services.

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“Can we predict what restaurants you’ll like when you’re in a new city? It may not be that you search for pizza, but we know you tend to like pizza places, or you tend to like more casual, loungey bars, so we can suggest things.”

Thanks Google for helping me stay the same forever. Just what I needed a search engine for.

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next,” Schmidt said

And you would be totally wrong to think that. Searching for things doesn't work nearly well enough for Google to move on to useless suggestions that extrapolate my current behavior in a completely uncreative way.

They are simply on the wrong track.

Searching isn't perfected today, so no one at Google should have or articulate a vision for 20 years in the future?

That attitude must make one a real buzz kill around 13 year olds. "You haven't mastered your classes for this semester yet, how dare you spend any time dreaming about what you might be when you grow up."

Thanks for encouraging Google to stay the same forever.

I'm not saying they shouldn't have a vision or shouldn't change. I'm saying I don't like this particular vision.

(I didn't downvote you by the way. I never downvote)

And yet this is a natural progression for Google. I'm really interested to see how/when the public begins to resent the algorithms that control their lives. Perhaps privacy will be a feature then.

They are on the most logical track given their assets, i.e. access to the real-time behavior of BILLIONS of human beings, something no entity has had access to in the history of the human race. Maybe you find their recommendation systems currently poor (personally I never leave the first page) but their potential to add value is ENORMOUS. They just need to forget facebook and go back to being google. If google is not mankind's first omniscient benevolent AI accessible through a simple http query within 20 years then google will have failed.

Thanks Google for helping me stay the same forever. Just what I needed a search engine for.

So you'd rather be pushed in the direction of becoming the "average consumer"?

I would say that helping him stay the same forever would make him be an "average consumer".

Not really true. If he's a vegetarian and most people aren't, he's not becoming more average by seeing vegetarian restaurants ranked above steakhouses. He's just getting results that he's more likely to find useful. (Try asking your vegan friends if they want a steak for dinner tonight. Do that every day. See if they get annoyed at all.)

Same goes for programming language. If you're programming Java and are googling for the Iterables library, you probably don't want to see the C# version. And if you always click Java results in preference to C# results, it makes sense to not clutter the top couple of results with C# information. You never use them, after all.

(Imagine the kind of advice you'd get from friends if they didn't know you. It wouldn't be very useful; you might as well ask a random stranger.)

Google is just a computer program whose config file you edit by using the Internet. Not all that scary.

What you say is true, in that context. I guess it depends on what the group is we're talking about when we're talking what "average" is. He could become an "average" consumer in the context of a vegetarian; always eating what every other vegetarian is eating because he's never offered an alternative.

As for your example with the programming languages, I would find it annoying if it only always displayed results for what it "thinks" I'm looking for. I'd rather define what language I need the information for. Otherwise, if I get accustomed to the system then it would impede me from researching a new language because I'll have to go on a crusade to convince it that I do indeed want information about a new subject. Then it learns my new subject but what if I want to go back to getting information about the old subject? Now I have to convince it that, yes, I do want the information I wanted before that I didn't want later that I want again now.

At least give us the option to turn it off.

I don't know where you got scary from though.

Google reverses your solution. By default, you use less words to get what it thinks you want. If you type more words, you get what you actually want. So 99% of the time, I get the Java results. If I want a Ruby result, I type "ruby" in the query dialog and now all the results are relevant.

Most people are not power users and only type a single word into the search box. Learning means that Google gives even novice users great results.

No, you repeated my solution. I stated I would rather it be that I have to type in "ruby", just as you state. You are ignoring what I said about getting accustomed to the system and forgetting to put in the "ruby" part. Then I have to repeat the search. Then Google suddenly thinks I'm a ruby developer. Then I have to convince it yet again for another example. It never ends.

Google trying to learn what it "thinks" people want creates the filter bubble, which is the point of the discussion. It will not always give the most relevant result on the topic but what it "thinks" is the most relevant to you; but it could be wrong, a lot.

Plus, has anybody discussed how this stuff might affect traffic for websites in general? If Google is sending different people with the same search query to completely different websites then being the most relevant on a topic might not be as helpful anymore.

Yes, in a way. Anything that diverges from the average should depend on the search terms I enter and on nothing else. No more second rate content from a local university. No pizza restaurant suggestions just because I happened to like one particular pizza restaurant for reasons unknown to Google.

Here's a query I might enter and I challenge Google to give me useful results: "restaurants with large tables in Paris, no Chinese food, not too expensive"

I want to be treated like the average consumer entering this search term. When I say "no Chinese food" I mean it. It might be that I'm with someone who doesn't like Chinese food even though I do. When I say "in Paris", I don't want Google to guess that it might be Paris, Texas just because I'm Dallas, Texas.

    They are simply on the wrong track.

So, what do you want?

I certainly do not want a few days of searching to be extrapolated into a complex determination of my future desires.

I obviously have no idea what sort of algorithm they use, and I can only assume it will be very intelligent, but if search suggestions of today are any indicator of the future, I foresee issues with people who may use Google so seldom such that it is unable to develop an accurate prediction and serves only to frustrate the end user.

Lol I thought much the same. The basic example she gives is a problem for me.

I know where the restaurants I like are. I've been going to them for years. The type of place I would search for is when I need somewhere, maybe more upmarket, to take a client to.

The last thing I need is for a search engine to point me at the same-old.

It's trying to turn out of ruts. You turn the steering wheel like a madman, but the tyres don't bite and you just keep going where you don't want to go.

This is why I do not particularly like last.fm.

I play a couple of metalcore band's and soon enough the only recommendations I get are 2 a penny metalcore bands. Yes, these bands are similar to what I want to listen to but how about some variance?

What Mayer is talking about sounds dangerous. I have a habit of looking for pizza places so this is what Google would prioritise.. I do not want this. It seems like it will skew search results.

I want Google to answer my questions and help guide me into asking the right questions to get the answers I am looking for. Beyond that.. i'm good.. I don't need anything else.

Sometimes I feel Google forgets its search is just that... search. An application to find things. It doesn't need to be anything more.

20 years from now we'll be finding things using technology we've never thought of, that was made by someone we've never heard of.

Also consider the idea that Google may not exist in 20 years.

The main problem I see with this is how unimaginative it really is. The things they talk about Google can basically do right now.

>> “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next,”

How convenient that they have millions of clients paying them to advertise their stuff to do/buy.

Google, can you please suggest a better search engine that is not full of it?

Can you please not show me a local retail clothing store as the first result of the query 'scala'?

Can you please stop mixing your business strategy with the actual fucking search results?!?!

Anyway, don't even mind me google, I'm on DuckDuckGo now.

I thought of a question from one of the threads I'm in for this article. If Google is sending different people with the same search query to different pages doesn't that reduce the value of being highly relevant on a topic?

20 years is like 200 years in internet-time.

Computers gets faster and cheaper. Eventually everyone affords their own Search-Engine. Flavored to their own personal needs, with 100% privacy, and with higher search-quality.

Spoiler alert! Google Search dies.

You mean this one?

http://www.yacy.de/en/

YaCy is a fanatic idea. I encourage people to watch the FSCONS video. Unfortunately YaCy will need a lot more momentum, developer interest and people using it to become useful imho.

Why, at the time I typed this, is every comment on that article comments from this thread? Most seem to have the same usernames but some are different. But every one of the comments seem a copy and paste from here.

I've never been a good Google user, never looked at their ads, always used noscript to block them on other sites, and often searched for obscure, little known information on a multitude of subjects. Google used to be immensely helpful, but has become less so recently. Searching for somewhat obscure information now brings up many commercial results which have nothing to do with my search, which, BTW, is often considered to be a typo. In the few times I've searched for consumer goods, most results were for outlets that do not ship to my country, so useless. But I guess I can't complain, they're not making any money out of me, and I'm using them for free.

Google is not giving you bad results to punish you for blocking ads.

The reason why Google is trying to learn more about you is to solve the exact problem you mention above. The Internet is getting bigger and bigger ever year, and the average cross section of the Internet is becoming less relevant to specific users. That's why signals like your search history or your friends' Google+ posts are useful; they can narrow down the infinite torrent of results to something that's useful to you specifically. This may be a little creepy but there's not much else you can do other than to build an index of the Internet yourself and tweak the ranking algorithm to suit your preferences.

Google gets a lot of press for collecting your personal information, but every site on the Internet does it. Go through your browsing history and figure out how to ask the sites you visited to delete your IP address, cookie hash, and user agent from their access.log. Pretty difficult.

(I'm not completely understanding why it's Google specifically that you care about making sure doesn't have your personal information. Is the imagined scenario that someday the government is going to officially hate people that meet profile X, raid Google's servers to get user profiles, mine the data to find people that meet profile X, and then hunt them down and lock them in a concentration camp? If you meet profile X and the government wants to lock you up for it, won't they eventually get you without Google's data?)

When software tries to be smart, it always fails. If software tries to be a leverage-tool for the users smartness, it works.

Google is on the wrong track.

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next,” Schmidt said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that sparked criticism from privacy advocates."

At least they're (sort of) upfront about it. That is advertising's exact task, to tell you what to do. What thing to buy. What destination to buy. What service to buy. And that does seem to be what people want, because most of us sit on the couch every night watching a box tell us what to do and what to buy.

Think of all the things Google might be telling you to do. Virtually all of them will involve cash changing hands. Google will never tell you to go for a walk or play with your kid.

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