Google`s Udi Manber Looks at Search - Future Features
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Unfortunately, it is Google policy to NOT comment about future plans, so in his recent interviews Manber could not come out and say what he and his team are working on to give us all a better search experience. “There will be lots of rocket-science things that will come along, but those I can’t talk about,“ he explained. Rest assured, though, they’re looking at all the current trends. And they have recently implemented some fascinating options that have not received a lot of press.
For instance, one new feature makes more of the world available to searchers. It’s called CLIR, for Cross Language Information Retrieval. The feature takes a user’s query, translates it into another language, performs the search in that language, and then translates the results into the user’s language. According to Manber, that gives users access to results in about 12 different languages. “So if you’re a user in Egypt, for example, and you only speak Arabic, you can write the query in Arabic, ask to translate it into English. When you then click on the results, it will translate the Web pages to Arabic for you -- all of it done by Google translation,” Manber explained. While anyone who has used Babelfish can tell you that automated language translation still leaves something to be desired, Manber believes this feature has a great deal of potential to open up the whole world to everybody.
What about social search and social networking sites? Does Google see this as the wave of the future? Manber notes that Google sees search as getting signals, putting lots of signals together and reading them. It stands to reason that the better the quality of your signals, the better the quality of your results. “Signals from people are the best signals,” Manber observed. “We have several tools -- and we’re going to launch many more -- that will encourage people to contribute more.” Even so, Manber does not agree with the idea of creating search results manually; one does not follow from the other.
Not surprisingly, Google will continue to work on personalized and universal search, seeing these as ways of giving users more options and a greater chance of finding exactly what they’re looking for on the first search. It will also continue to tune results by location; the country in which you’re searching will affect your search results, and they may not be the same as the same search performed in a different country, even if the searches are performed in the same language. And it will also continue to fight spam and to keep porn out of results where it isn’t appropriate; Manber says it’s harder to fight spam than porn, because porn web sites typically aren’t trying to trick you into thinking they’re something they’re not.
Google is also working on getting better at video and photo search. According to Manber, the problem isn’t quite as bad as not knowing what’s in the picture, since they can tell what it is with text. “The problem is you want to look at the Hearst Building with the sign from the right angle with the sun up above,” he said by way of illustrating that it’s understanding the quality of the image, and the details desired, that’s the real challenge. “That’s going to require some combination of some image processing and some information about it. The metadata around the image is going to get more important.”
But whatever features Google adds in the future, or new adjustments it makes in its algorithm, it all comes back to one thing: does it serve the searcher? Does it help the user find what he or she is looking for more quickly, more efficiently, more easily? And that is why, if Manber’s informal observation holds true, in five years we’ll be able to accomplish the kinds of things with search that we can only imagine in science fiction now. Buckle up; we’re in for an exciting ride.
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