The end of search as we know it

Stephen Hutcheon

SAN FRANCISCO: The head of search at Google wants to blow up web search. And the demolition job is already under way.

Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice-president of engineering, revealed the plan on Wednesday at Google I/O, its annual developers' conference.

In short, the typewritten keyword search is yielding to voice-driven conversational search. And, down the track, more anticipation of what the searcher is seeking will be built into responses.

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"It will change how you and I experience this beautiful journey that we call life," Dr Singhal told the audience.

He said his inspiration for this leap forward came from watching Star Trek on television when he was growing up in India.

Dr Singhal is known as Google's master of the ranking algorithm, the mathematical formula that determines what rises to the top of a search and what doesn't.

In 2010, Fortune magazine named him one of the "smartest people in tech". So he knows his stuff.

The changes will be integrated across all platforms – desktop, tablet and mobile –as part of an upgrade to the Google Chrome browser and will be released during the coming months.

Using the spoken command "OK, Google," the search engine will spring to life and wait for your query, your command.

But instead of using keywords, the demonstration was conducted using voice alone – no hands, not even to initiate the voice search.

The search engine replied to queries about where to visit, where to eat, driving instructions and even fired off an email.

Some of these functions already exist in Google Now, which began last year, and similar kinds of functionality is available on Apple's Siri service.

Facebook launched its Graph Search service in January, which uses natural language-processing technology.

The race is on to perfect the process and Google feels it's in the lead. "Are we there yet? No. Will we get there? Yes. Will we be the first to get there? Yes," Dr Singhal said.

smh.com.au