</figure> One of Google's top engineers and the world's foremost expert on search engines says his next challenge is to turn Google into everyone's personal assistant capable of making suggestions and guiding users through their day without them having to lift a finger.
Google fellow Amit Singhal who has studied search for 20 years said what many would relegate to the realms of Star Trek was only a few years from becoming a reality. Already our always-connected phones can tell Google where we are (thanks to the built-in GPS) and our appointment schedule; they can speak to us and take instructions by voice. Google also knows a lot about the world around us and our own preferences based on past searches - all that's needed now is an "intelligent glue" to tie everything together.
Mobile becomes your robot helper
Soon Google's systems would know your appointments and be able to tell you what time to leave based on traffic and other information.Furthermore if Google knows you like Thai restaurants and that you drive past the best one in your city every day on the way to work Google will soon be intelligent enough to suggest that you go and eat there. "My son
breitling windrider cockpit watches when I was coming to the US said: 'Dad bring me a Japanese baseball.' I coach little league to my son and my calendar knows today that I have 15 minutes between my last appointment here and my dinner appointment at my hotel " Singhal said in an interview. "If you combine my calendar time with my geography which is the path from here to my hotel and you combine the information atom 'baseball shops' or 'sports shops' between here and there what you have is the beginning of that personal assistant that can proactively tell me three blocks down the road turn right
tissot watch pick up a Japanese baseball for your son and then you can go to your dinner." Singhal who was an academic researcher in search before joining Google in 2000
replica zenith foudroyante paypal watches calls this "search without searching".
Alan Eustace head of Google's engineers worldwide pointed to a recent prediction that mobile phone searches would overtake desktop searches in 2012. "There will be new things that you do on a phone that never occurred to you; just like navigation right now [and] augmented reality " he said in an interview. "I never thought voice search was ever going to work. I supported voice search my entire career as a research director but I never thought that it would reach a point where an untrained user could walk up to a device and input a query and have it correctly find the output."
Search dreams become reality
Singhal described how the five major dreams he had around search two decades ago had already become reality thanks in part to high-powered mobile phones with GPS navigation.
1. Searching outside text - Google's search engine can now search images and video files. Copious amounts of information that was never in digital form is now searchable thanks to initiatives such as Google Street View and book scanning. Google Goggles lets users search for information just by submitting a photo of a landmark and translate text just by taking a photo of it.
2. Search beyond language - Users can now translate any pages and even conduct "cross-language searches" allowing those who are for instance travelling to Japan to search information on Japanese-language websites and have the results and web pages displayed in English. Coming soon is the ability to have a conversation with someone who doesn't speak your language and have translation performed on the fly.
3. Search that knows me - If you're a cricket fan and have conducted searches on the game on Google and you search for "lords" the top result will be the Lords cricket ground in London. The old results would list the Lords multiplayer online game first. Google search can also tailor results depending on your location while another newer Google feature throws up a section of results containing pages published by people you have identified as being in your online or offline social circle. "Imagine if I had told you 20 years back that each and every one of you would have a tailor-made search engine for you? We have come a long way in realising that dream " he said.
4. Search the present moment - Google's "real-time search" compiles content that is being generated by the minute on sites such as Twitter and other services. "There was an earthquake in California and Google's real-time search beat the US Geological Survey in telling the world that there was an earthquake in California by a whole eight minutes " Singhal said.
5. Search that understands me - The "holy grail" of search engine technology is enabling machines to understand language like human beings do. Google has already come a long way in this regard by allowing its search engine to run voice searches and recognise that words mean different things depending on their context. For instance the keyword "change" could mean "adapt" "convert" "exchange" "install" or "switch" depending on the query and Google's search engine was already able to intelligently deduce this meaning.
Key pieces missing
But Singhal said there were still several pieces of the puzzle to put in place before his dream of "searching without search" could become a reality. "Today some of the critical pieces that actually senses my environment to guide me through my day are missing - [my mobile] doesn't know that I need to buy a baseball " said Singhal. "I don't expect people to record everything they say that would be fairly invasive. What I expect to happen is I just turn on my phone and say 'buy baseball' that's it ... right now I don't do that because the best I can use that input for is to put a sticky note on my screen - that's not that big a deal." Of course such a high level of personalisation is bound to send privacy advocates and regulators into a spin. Just ask Mark Zuckerberg the chief executive officer of Facebook who has been raked over the coals several times by attempting to personalise advertising and other site features by forcing users to make more personal details available publicly. Singhal said the key to solving these issues was transparency and control. Already Google Dashboard allows users to view and manage the information stored about them on Google's servers and this would be critical for the new "personal assistant" feature."I really really believe that privacy is critical to a successful product ... users should have a right to divulge whatever they want and definitely a right to keep private whatever they want private " Singhal said.
Asher Moses travelled to Tokyo as a guest of Google.
by Asher Moses
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