When do you think that kind of artificially intelligent search will happen?
I think that understanding language is kind of the last frontier in artificial intelligence, and then talking to a computer will be just like talking to a reference librarian, because they will both be equally knowledgeable about the world and about you.
The big difference, and this is where the search pets come in, is that the reference librarian will understand emotions and other nonfactual information that even a fully intelligent computer may have trouble with.
In terms of timing, I typically say about 200 to 300 years. I think it is probably closer to the 300th year end of it. But if it ends up being closer to the 200th year, I would not be around in any case, and I will not be able to have anyone gainsay me.
Good thinking
Going back further, even 30 years, the people who were working on artificial intelligence in the 60s thought all these problems would be solved by today -- and we are basically not very much closer in terms of those overall high AI goals of understanding language.
Some computer scientists suspect that PageRank is dead, because Internet marketers have managed to exploit it by creating false popularity for their sites. Is that true? Has it been altered, or is it playing less of a role?
The point of view that PageRank is dead is kind of a very static view of the world. It will always continue to be a part of our ranking scheme but, over time, as we develop new ideas on how to do ranking, as we tweak existing ideas, as we think about new ways to have them play together -- the role of any one of the techniques that we use will obviously change.
Are there any other algorithm techniques that you are using that are playing a bigger role?
Well, there are certainly other techniques that we are using. Talking about it is the trickier part. In broad terms, techniques we use fall into, like, two or three categories, and one is we try to understand and leverage human intelligence. We look for signals that people put in to indicate intelligence, like deciding to link from one page to another or annotating text with the description of what the text is about.
How many servers is Google currently running? Some say 100,000; others say 10,000. Others say Google's computing setup is the most interesting thing about the company, in that search is just an application that is running on a platform that can do literally anything you want it to -- for example, Gmail. Is that a fair assessment of Google's strengths?
That is very interesting you should say that. The history of search is actually a history of search engines being put on top of an application that was not developed for search. AltaVista, for instance, was developed as a proof of concept of Digital Equipment's Alpha servers.
