Forum Moderators: bakedjake
We could soon view today’s keyword searching with the same nostalgia and amusement reserved for bygone technologies such as electric typewriters and vinyl records.”
So declares Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, in an essay published Thursday in the science journal Nature. (Available online to subscribers or for a single copy purchase of $32.)
The missing ingredients, he writes, are mainly the necessary investments in money and science by leading technology companies and universities. The better world of search, according to Mr. Etzioni, will be services that field spoken or typed questions and generate useful answers. Or, as he writes, “natural-language searching and answering, rather than providing the electronic equivalent of the index at the back of a reference book.”
The big companies engaged in search — Google and Microsoft — have taken steps toward delivering smarter search, Mr. Etzioni concedes. But, he adds, “most of what Google and Microsoft have done so far is to take traditional search and play with it around the edges.”
