Some of this is still in the research stage and not quite ready for prime time. Others are easy technologically, but have issues on the business side: for instance, searching music files.
Voiced-enabled searching isn't completely science fiction at the moment, is it? You are working on a project with BMW in this area.
Voice recognition is still very much a research problem. The BMW project is promising, but I think there's more work to be done, both in academia and in industry. This particular sub-problem I think we can lick in sooner than 300 years.
Google News and the recently launched specialist ecommerce search site Froogle are still in beta, how long before they are officially finished products?
We're continuing to develop new features -- Froogle just added the ability to sort by price, for instance, which a lot of people had asked for -- and we're continuing to evaluate feedback on what people think we're doing well and not so well. Once we're happy with the features we offer and the feedback we get on them, we'll take these projects out of beta. We're in no rush though; the main Google site stayed in beta for years.
Microsoft has publicly voiced its intentions to move into search in a bigger way with the eventual release of Longhorn, which will attempt to unify local and Internet searches. How is Google going to meet this challenge if and when it happens? Do you see Microsoft as a bigger threat than Yahoo long-term?
We're glad to see competition in search, because it means that companies are focusing on what I believe to be a very important problem on the Web: finding what you want out of all the information that's out there -- the more minds that attack that problem, the better. Obviously, I'd rather those minds work for Google. But regardless, I as a Web user benefit as long as the competition is there and stays focused on the technology.
