Google’s “Future Of Search”

Search Engine Land published details of Google Research Director Peter Norvig’s interview with MIT Technology Review today. It proves very interesting reading – while nothing is really new it gives us an insight into what Google are working on and what possible future products may be appearing.

Google seems to be focusing on both machine translation and a speech project. Translation and speech has gone from one or two people working on small projects to live systems . Google are looking at speech technology that could serve as an interface for phones and also index audio text.

From Peter’s interview Google seems to accept that some people are more comfortable using voice interfaces and are more likely to interact this way. See below.

“One of the things we’re looking at is finding ways to get the user more involved, to have them tell us more of what they want. People type the query “map,” and then they get upset if it’s not the map they were thinking of. So, people may be willing to talk more than type. Or maybe they’re willing to take a suggestion if we offer something that they didn’t type a query for, but is related.”