Comments on: Google’s Long Term Goals: More of the Same

By: dinesh vadhia

dinesh vadhia — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 09:17:20 +0000

I was making a general point (independent of Schmidt’s PR) about entering a query and the search engine returning the right answer. If I go into my local Apple Store (or for that matter any publicly available machine that I’ve never used before) and enter the query ‘sunshine’ what is the right answer that the search engine is going to send? Sure, with personalization the search engine is likely to return the right answer but that is not new news. I’m parsing the absurd here ie. can a search engine return the right answer for you without knowing something about you beforehand?

By: jeremy

jeremy — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:59:12 +0000

@dinesh: First, your point about it being a distillation comment is well taken. However, I think there are dozens of better ways he could have said something equally pithy without expressing the exact sentiment that was expressed.

For example, instead of saying “The long term goal is to be able to give you one answer”, Schmidt could have just as pithily said, “The long term goal is to satisfy your information need”. Or “your need for information”.

Satisfaction of that need could then come in a myriad of forms: One right answer, a set of answers, a set of better questions, a characterization of a space, a comparison and a contract between competing answers, etc. If your information need is to have a comparison, then so be it. If your information need is to have one answer, then so be it.

But you can be pithy without sacrificing accuracy. How does it make for worse PR, to be both pithy and accurate, as opposed to just pithy? Unless Google’s goals really do not include doing anything but “one answer” search.

Second: When you ask whether or not there is one right answer, are you talking about results personalization? The right answer for me is not necessarily the right answer for you? Sure, I believe that. But that still doesn’t change what Schmidt said. He said, “The long term goal is to be able to give you one answer”. The “you” includes, in my understanding, results personalization. But the phrase as a whole still does not include exploratory information needs.

@Raza: Yes, I hope that they do realize that there is more to information retrieval than the one right answer.

By: dinesh vadhia

dinesh vadhia — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:18:43 +0000

The pithy comment is most likely a distillation of Google’s roadmap and could mean a thousand things. An engineer many levels below from Schmidt could probably extrapolate the comment into a book of a thousand pages. It all makes for good PR.

Secondly, is there really one right answer to a query? For example, say I pop over to the local Apple Store to use one of their machines because it doesn’t know me and enter the query ‘sunshine’ into Google. What is the right answer at that moment in time?

By: Raza

Raza — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:59:45 +0000

I totally agree with your take on Schmidit’s comments. However, he says “..I don’t know how to characterize the next 10 years except to say that we’ll get to the point.. “, lets hope that by that time he will realize that “giving one right answer” is definitely not the way to go.