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Future search efforts will make Google look like 8-tracks
1 hour, 32 minutes ago

What's next? The Google Diet? The Five Googles You Meet in Heaven?


But, you know, much as I couldn't live without it, Google stinks.


Ten years from now - maybe five or even less - we will recall Google circa 2004 and wonder how we could have tolerated it. You know, sort of the way we look back on eight-track tapes.


It's a disaster that I type "turtles" into Google and get 1.9 million results. On the first page, Google serves up ninjaturtles.com, seaworld.com and theturtles.com (devoted to the 1960s band that sang Happy Together). Yet what I want is information about the soccer team I play on, the Turtles - so named because of the speed at which we run.


Google today can't know that's what I'm searching for, but it should. In fact, someday it will, if Google doesn't get roasted by Microsoft or somebody else between now and then.


This is not lost on Google's executives. At a conference last week called PC Forum, Google CEO Eric Schmidt essentially told the audience what he wished Google could become.


"I keep asking for a product called Serendipity," he said, making up the name. This product would have access to everything ever written or recorded, know everything the user ever worked on and saved to his or her personal hard drive, and know a whole lot about the user's tastes, friends and predilections.


"Then when I'm typing a paper, it would know what I'm writing about and say, 'Hey, you forgot this,' " Schmidt said.


That's where search has to go. Eventually, search will be like a direct connection between your brain and all the world's information. It will grasp so much about you and your immediate circumstance that it will often know exactly what you need, perhaps even before you do. It will be an electronic Radar O'Reilly.


No company is there yet. But out in tech's primordial soup, you can see individual pieces evolving.


The first and simplest piece is what you get from Google and other search engines. This is known as the visible Web. It's all the stuff posted on Web sites and open to browsing - billions of pages, some of it valuable, much of it not.


But vast as it is, searching the visible Web is just a beginning. It's like the invention of the wheel - a breakthrough, but a long way from a Porsche 911 Carrera.


Other pieces that are starting to form:


• The invisible Web. This is the stuff you can't readily see and search engines don't usually find. One example is content that's available only by subscription, like stories on Salon.com or video on ABC's paid site. Schmidt says Google is looking at ways to find that content and display a brief description of it. That way the user would know it exists but would still have to go to that site and pay to get it.


Blogs - essentially Web-based diaries - are a growing part of the invisible Web. Blog search engines, such as Technorati, are popping up. But Technorati doesn't search the rest of the Web, just as Google doesn't search blogs.


Books are increasingly a part of the invisible Web. Despite all the content on the Web, vastly more is locked in books. Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" feature gets at some of that. Google doesn't touch it.





• Localization. Google has no idea where you are unless you tell it. So if I search for Hooters - not that I ever do - it can't automatically know I'm in a hotel in Houston and want to find one nearby. Technology is emerging from companies such as Quova that can let a Web site know approximately where you are - but not a specific address, which would rightly make privacy advocates apoplectic. In fact, a lot of these new search functions will stir privacy worries.

• Your hard drive. Sometimes, what you want is somewhere on your hard drive, perhaps buried in notes you took at that 1999 Las Vegas convention you hardly remember. Or maybe it's in an e-mail. If you don't know, it can be hard to find.

You can download software, such as X1 from Idealab, that searches everything in your computer. But it's still not possible to type a search term into something like Google and have it search both the Web and the computer's insides. Microsoft's next operating system, code-named Longhorn, is supposed to do that. It might be the biggest single threat to Google.

• Your life. Google knows nothing about you. It's trying. Google has a new personalization feature. You can inform Google that if you type in "bass," you're looking for a musical instrument, not a fish. But the function is still very limited, which means it doesn't know nearly enough to truly help you, and it has no way to keep learning more.

One new site is taking an interesting approach to this problem. It's called Eurekster. It works, in part, by combining search with letting you set up a network of friends online - sort of a cross between Google and Friendster. By monitoring what you and your friends click on, it can increasingly understand more about your needs and can tailor searches to that.

As Eurekster gets more sophisticated, it could understand that you hang out with plumbers, not Grateful Dead fans - and give you more appropriate results when you search for the word "pipe."

Google recently created its own Friendster-type site, called Orkut. Probably not a coincidence.

Eventually, all these elements will meld together - the visible Web, the invisible Web, localization, your stored content and info about your life. The final piece will be software that can understand what you're typing or reading and constantly look for related content.

A search engine of 2010 will know who you are, where you are and what you're doing, and look across every form of information to automatically find what will help you.

That's when today's Google will seem as quaint as the special effects in an old Godzilla movie.

Kevin Maney has covered technology for USA TODAY since 1985. His column appears Wednesdays. Click here for an index of Technology columns. E-mail him at: [e-mail]://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=711&ncid=1212&e=1&u=/usatoday/200403....