Jessica Guynn has an excellent interview with Google’s Marissa Mayer today about Google’s first ten years (today is arguably Google’s tenth birthday). Good stuff in there - Marissa talks about Google’s accomplishments in search and advertising, and looks forward to a future where cloud computing becomes pervasive. Marissa also says she hopes to still be at the company in another ten years.
But one thing caught my eye. Marissa says search is “90 to 95%” solved:
Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95% of the solution, but there is a lot to go in the remaining 10%. How do we monetize new forms of content as they come online such as video, maps and books. How do we help content providers transition their businesses online and build healthy businesses.
Here’s the thing. I don’t think search is even close to being solved yet. In a May 25 post I talked about how early I think we are in search, and why a competitive search market is so important to make sure innovation keeps happening:
Innovation In Search Has Just Begun
I simply cannot believe that just a little over a decade into the commercial Internet, Tim O’Reilly is willing to say that the search war is over. Did he not read his good friend John Battelle’s book, The Search? He’s not the only expert out there who thinks the war is over - Danny Sullivan argued as much on the Gillmor Gang last week. But I simply cannot believe that this is all we can expect in terms of search innovation.
There are so many areas on search that remain to be conquered. Semantic search. Real language/AI search. The deep web. Media search. Today search basically returns web documents. What I want is for search to complete tasks for me. We’re no where near that today.
We are just getting started in search. To think that search has reached its pinnacle today is like saying aircraft were perfected before World War I. And if just one company were to carry on in aircraft innovation at that point, I doubt we’d have jetliners whisking us around the world today.
Innovation does not occur at a rapid pace without competition. If Google or any company were to control search exclusively, we could expect to see little happen in search technology or business models over even the medium and long term.
Sure, the odd startup or two would still come along and try to shake things up. But search is infrastructure intensive - the cost and difficulty of indexing the web and building a business in an established market requires resources that most new startups can’t realistically access. And if the market consolidates further, competing will become that much harder. There’s a reason monopolies get broken up by governments - market forces can’t generally undo them.
If search was 90% solved, Google could look at a picture of me standing by the Eiffel Tower and know, without textual metadata, what’s there. It could return results for a Barack Obama query that include all the videos he’s in, again without relying on tags or other textual metadata. Natural language. Deep web searches. Semantic search. All of these problems are unsolved.
This is not the long term solution to image search.
But anyway, Happy Birthday Google. You’ve done a lot in ten years. Just don’t give up on search yet.
Comments
Comments Pages: [1] 2 » Show All
She is talking from the point of view of a marketing person - not from a high tech perspective.
Obviously, the technology a few decades from now will be extremely different from what we are experiencing today.
Just TRY to imagine search technology in the 22nd century!
Indeed. 90% of the “user experience” (as she defines it) is solved. Whatever that means.
Otherwise…”paging Kurt Godel…”
Nobody wants to waste time on video, nor images are so important as of now. Arrington sooner u stop whining better for u and TC.
All we want in search now is little better aesthetics and organising of related contents little like yahoo glue search. Which google is cant afford doing for their paid clicks..
@UH, so the ultimate user experience is:
- return to the MSDOS prompt line
- results that send searchers to a random website; where over 50% exit in less than 5 seconds — translation — unhappy user
Google has the search share, and hantdles lean-back search. But, that’s a trivial problem since 26% use Google to replace the URL address box.
For lean-forward, problem-solving search, the UX is frustration, frustration, frustration.
-Dash
http://adecon101.blogspot.com/
Search is solved. Google has pretty much solved the algorithim and search. They have not solved Location. Who needs a algorithim when you have a common sense vertical location channel on a network. She does not understand that the internet and finding things was never was about search it was about “Location.” Google has not mastered location one bit. When it comes to pure custom vertical offerings on a network they come up empty. Algorthims cannot compete with 1200+ Multichannel Vertical Locator Engine Network.
“Future Masters of Internet Findability will Play Ball on a Custom Strategic Multichannel Location Platform. When Search companies focus on Common Sense Multichannel Location Networks, the alogithim as we know it could be dead in less than 5 years.”
KillerLocator.com-Till death do us part.
http://www.killerstartups.com/.....or-network
Let 2018 arrive and all the guys who believe search is 90% solved will find themselves literally stunned…
I am amazed to see Google’s key representative talking like this…If she won’t talk visionary,then who else..
I’d certainly agree that by taking a technology perspective we see that search is not solved. But I don’t think it’s right to explain this response as a “marketing person’s” - that undervalues looking at this from a markets point of view.
Look at search from a pure market-evolution / profit patterns point of view:
One company dominates the market. Customers (advertisers) have to pay auction-high prices, and one company (Google) extracts most of the value from the market. Customers feel that pain.
These market conditions are rarely (if ever) sustained by any company for any significant amount of time - in the entire history of business. The situation is not long-term stable. This customer need and this huge value-inequality create the conditions needed for market evolution.
There have been natural monopolies before, and they have all, eventually, fallen. So Google’s monopoly will too, and with it, we’ll see the evolution of search.
tom saffell
“Just TRY to imagine search technology in the 22nd century!”
Will we need to search in the 22nd century?
I would imagine, our brain will be integrated with G-Brain, so we will not need to search, we will remember, with memory cooked by Google, though the underlying technology is still search. The line between searching and remembering will be blurred.
I do know that google made something, but the serach field is still emregnet and the given percentage is not accurate. How could she support her claims
I’m actually wondering if I’m misreading it somehow. The last part of the paragraph talks about marketing, so…dunno.
Search will continue to evolve. I can’t imagine an internet in 10 years that has only 5% - 10% “improvement” to what we experience today. Even from a marketing perspective, search isn’t solved. It is better than it was, but things change quickly when innovations are introduced (see Google’s history).
Where is search deficient?
* Video
* Audio
* Other multimedia
* Community driven media (forums, for example)
* The “Dark Web” - beyond the “SUBMIT” button, where Google has just started to crawl
Google doesn’t have a lock on this. I’ve spoken and worked on projects in this space and these types of search problems are as vexing as they’ve were 3 years ago. My sense is that someone is going to come up with a better mousetrap.
With the emergence of cheap, utility cloud computing, wouldn’t the next Google competitor in search have it much easier than Google did? Assuming they can figure out a better algorithm, the search innovators of the future can use Google App Engine and close the circle
90% solved? Even from marketing perspective what it is very populist and vague way to describe things. 90% of what - time, money, complexity needed to “solve” marketing problems around search? What is definition of 100% - is it set in stone or a moving target?
For growing number of resources, their morphing structure, demands for quality and precision - this is an ongoing task that cannot be measured as “solved” or “unsolved” or “90% solved”. Even from marketing perspective.
In other words: Altavista 90% solved the problem, then Yahoo 90% solved the problem, if Google will put a cap on their solution then most certainly it will be another disruptive player who will change the game….
She definitely seems to be speaking about “textual metadata” search, that does seem to be somewhat solved, 90% I doubt it.
Google is better than the rest, however thinking that a page with 10 links is what I will see 20 years from now is a very depressing thought. Google does not give me an answer to most questions, it just points me in a direction which might help, so if a reference guide is what we are looking for then sure search is solved, if we want to save time and get answers we still have a long way to go.
Searching, and indexing are not one and the same. Getting into the search market may well be a task for “smarter” algorithms (that may utilize the exisitng index base - lets see Google try and stop those usages without the government clinging to its back).
The war is not over, and its going to be very interesting.
I wonder how long we will just be using keywords when using search engines. If Google rolls out natural language, then we would be closer to 90%.
I have no idea what she was thinking. From no perspective is search 90% solved. Michael is completely right — search will blend into personal assistant which will blend into strong AI. And monetization schemes will evolve from crude CPMs and CPCs into highly targeted CPAs and beyond.
I actually think today’s search is much closer to the beginning of its evolution than WWI planes were to theirs. Saying search is 90% done is like a caveman saying transportation is 90% solved with the invention of the moccasin.
It’s Search - which is to find leads based on your queries.
Google does that very well.
If you want somebody to read your mind, or do things completely for you - then get a mind reader and a personal maid.
How many relevant videos of Barack Obama out there aren’t labeled as containing footage of him? Anything remotely interesting is going to be picked up by someone and tagged; then Google can do the rest. Struggling to identify people, objects and concepts IN MAINSTREAM SEARCH just doesn’t really pay off. Instead of 189,000 youtube results for BO, you’d get 190,000 with the additional videos probably ranking very poorly. Does that help?
Sure, Google isn’t able to produce comprehensive answers that require more than maching text against a document. It can’t dynamically come up with tutorials on how to build an airplane using bits of information from a million different places (and pick the best options when it comes to techniques or materials); but supposing you do vaguely know what you’re after, it gives pretty damn good leads to follow up on.
I’m all for competition and I really really want to see one strong runner up (in terms of quality, not traffic volume). And looking back at the recent MSFT-YHOO drama, I still don’t see how that would’ve created a *better* player.
Struggling? Never heard of automation I guess. AI will simply take over all ‘inpossible’ things. And it does pay off, since as soon as a competitor stands up and finds more relevant stuff for you, you dump Google instantly.
How can they say 90%? Is google search still in beta or something :).
Cuil had an idea of where search should be leaning towards (Relevant pictures accompanying text). Such a statement reminds me of
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899 (attributed)
I guess she meant in another context, or for this decade. As for search supremacy, I back Google as long as the trio ( Larry, Sergey and Eric) are up there!
I noticed it as well and my take was she’s saying things without giving it much thought. We all make small mistakes like that.
But I have to say I hope it wasn’t a mistake because if she really believes search is 90% done and this resembles Google’s thinking, then Google will face some competition because right now they have none. And the way this is going … I’m not sure, but I don’t think a company who controls the market is what we want.
It is going to take one of those “leaps” Guy Kawasaki likes to give keynotes on to upset the apple cart. Thankfully those seem to happen faster on the internet.
Ms Mayer is simply following the construct which both Brin and Eric Schmidt have used - they’re trying as a matter of corporate policy to tampen down & dissuade other startups and simple-minded VCs from entering “their” space, leaving it to them. The only thing they’ve solved 90 percent, if that, is textually relevant short-form advertising. Anyone who thinks that is “the solved future” is pretty short-sighted, and playing into Goog’s hands.
Saying search is 90% done is like Bill gates saying “no one needs more than 640K memory in their computers ” or the head of DEC saying “there’s no reason for someone to have a personal computer” - it’s (rear view mirror) RVM thinking - and linear extrapolation which doesn’t take the tectonic shifts caused by innovation into account. What Marissa Meyer is saying is that from *Google’s* myopic viewpoint and by their definition of search 90% of search is done. That’s not the same as saying 90% of search is done - unless someone thinks there’s no life (or innovation) outside Google. Google will really innovate when it admits that it doesn’t know how much of search is done.
It’s also interesting that when Marissa talks about the other 10% all she’s talking about is monetizing search as if that is equivalent to innovation in search.
I love your analogy with the 640k limitation. It’s amazing to see people always people we are so advanced. We just have to look 20 years ago (I was programming on my Commodore Vic-20 with 3.5K of RAM).
As for search, we are probably at 20%!
for practical purposes, i agree with her. when i use google, i find what i’m looking for probably more than 95% of the time.
as for bill gates, he says… “we are just scratching the surface with search” (he said it on the big idea with donnie douche)… i think he is in denial about how strong google’s position is.
I’m completely surprised no one gets this. She wasn’t very good at conveying it but what I believe she meant to do was emphasize how difficult the last 10+% of search is going to be.
To put in it terms of the pareto principle, Google has done the ground work (the first 80+%) and has probably given us 20% of search’s potential capability. However its the last 20% of development and tweaks to search that will unleash the other 80% of its power.
The things you are all talking about dont drastically change the general concepts when we think about search they just fall into the arena of tweaks that will improve its effectiveness and functionality
Search has a very long way to go. It almost feels like every other day a new application relating to search is introduced. You can break down search into local and different categories. This is only starting.
“The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.” - Henry Ellsworth, Commissioner of Patents, 1843.
Your in good company Marrissa
Google will come and go, yahoo did, altavista did. I don’t see them really doing much greatness outside of adwords, and thats not without faults. If it doesnt work for you and you can stand the way they jack up the prices, forcing you to keep switching accounts etc. And video? LOL not even close yet.
id hit it.
and she’d slice it.
Search is solved!
I think %10 is a better figure. We’ve hardly touched the skin of what search can and will do. Heck even the search engine I work on is an evolution of search. (http://mse360.com/) Evolution will happen, Google will not stay king. The question is who will take over?
Google brought search to a new level but to say its 90% there…huh? Is there ever a “done” with search. It can always get better. It can certainly improve on mobile and other connected devices and it can certainly improve on the web. I use Google every day, at this point I’d be lost without it but there are still hundreds of sites that game the system. How many times do you land on a page that is nothing but ads - still happens. What is the average number of searches you have to do to find what you are looking for? There is a long way to go. The good news is that this will create opportunities for new start-ups, especially if that is Google’s mindset. Google has been a great giant, but giants will always fall not if…when.
I think Google even know they wall fall when it comes to search. That’s why they are are trying to branch out into new genres of sites. Google Maps and Gmail for example. I think they’ve got a point where they’ve forgotten search is there company.
google maybe 90% index
but search solve far from it
I think they have a solution for 90-95% of the problems they face but the processing power is still 10-20 years away to index more than just meta data.
90%也太夸张了，感觉不可能做到。
Actually a percentage of 90% is hardly to reach if to any advanced searching technology, i think.
Okey, google can do more than 50%,but others ,i don’t think so,again, you can search any swf file ,which just insert one website like http://www.video-to-flash.com
No , no, any search can do that:)
Solving search is more than just proper indexing of video and image, but also making the input of search criteria easier. I should be able to just slap in a video clip or an image to find it on the Internet. By then, it won’t be a web anymore, and more like a cloud.
Ten years from now we are going to look back at the search technology of 2008 and acknowledge how obsolete it was. I agree that today we can envision a search that identifies terms in pictures, video, and sound without tags. But, I think the real interesting question is what will exist in ten years that we could not even envision today.
I don’t think her comment and your response are necessarily in conflict. As developers say- “First you do the first 90 percent. Then you do the last 90 percent.”
She says:
“Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95% of the solution, but there is a lot to go in the remaining 10%. How do we monetize new forms of content as they come online such as video, maps and books.”
Which means that they have solved the problem of knowing how to monetize 90% of the content. For the rest they are yet to figure it out.
From the users perspective Search is still an unresolved problem.
What does “90%” mean? One needs a benchmark before this conversation makes sense. Imagine: in 1800, the steam engine was 80% done, in 1900 it was 90%, and today? It comes down to energy output — we have a benchmark, we know what we’re discussing. The search question is more like: in 1800, how much of transportation is ’solved’, and in 1900, and today? (Are we talking horses, cars, spaceships??)
I tend to agree with Bill Gates that we’re in the 2nd innings for search. Whether Google holds on to its dominant position from the 3rd to 10th innings depends on one thing: when the next killer-search-paradigm app emerges, will Google buy the start-up behind it or will Microsoft (or someone else)?
Hello Michael,
I replied the last time when you wrote the blog about this and I do it again. In my opinion, search is maybe 10% mastered!
Use Google and search for the map of the London underground. You will get three maps on top which is nice, but 2 of 3 are outdated and don’t have the London City Airport in the maps (You have that with many searches that they are outdated). That shows a basic problem that an algorithm alone is just stupid and ONLY the human knowledge is aware of that.
When I knocked on your door in May I showed you my idea of a search engine. It is now available in a new version where users can tell the search engine that results are not matching or even create their own results and cash in on advertisement. I hope that during TC50 I have the chance to talk to people to get the new version out. What I have gathered so far, they are very interested in the new concept.
Search is far from done! Every day will bring new ideas it is just bad that Google is so big and thus it is very hard to compete as everybody knows Google but nobody knows the little guys and so we just have to fight harder;-)
Best,
Martin
Saying “search is solved.” really translates to: “google is running out of ideas to improve search.”
What do expect? Afterall, they are an ad company…
Google hasn’t run out of things to do. She’s just saying that Search (like many proven technologies) has matured. Frankly, I fear that Google will take on too many projects and be the next Microsoft.
Heh - I’d rather trust Craig Silverstein who “…still believes that search needs significant improvement and that it might take 100 years to realize.
‘We need to make search as good as a human answering a search request,’ Silverstein said. “We need to be like the computer on ‘Star Trek,’ and we are very, very far from that.’” - Chron ( http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/.....12ORSF.DTL )
Jessica is a talented journalist and writer. The SF Chronicle made a mistake to let her go!
Search is just beginning.
What MM is saying is that Google is %90 to its capacity of what it can provide for search - which is 2d machine analysis of crawled content
Machine results are just a starting point and are but a tool for the creation of the truly useful SERP.
This sucks. Where is fuckedcompany.com?
You bought it… and you ended it? I want that, not this.
When search engines give us the right site for our keyword search in the first position meaning that is the only search hit people click then google is done. How often do people click only one link in searches?
So is Google supposed to read your mind?
Like she says though, there is a lot to do in that last 10 percent. If we’re thinking 80-20 rule here, where that last 20% requires 80% of the effort, research, knowledge, etc., then by saying it’s 90% or 95% is saying it’s still far away.
Yeah!! I agree with the people that provided an interpretation of the 90/95% as a means of saying:
1) This is our capacity
2) 80% (as in the 80/20) is good enough for now but hardly the end of the road.
marissa is the spokesperson for google? wow, she’s clueless about technology. search hasn’t even begun. the fluff google search offers is non-relevant and accompanied by loads of spammy text ads. that model will die within 10 years
remember when bill gates said this about RAM?
“640K ought to be enough for anybody. - ”Bill Gates, 1981
Try getting relevant results for ” windows automated incremental backup ” . This is a pretty obvious thing to type in , but you just can’t get to an authoritative results.
Bad! Google Bad!
BTW:
Anyone know of a good Time-Machine equivelant for windows?
Everyone has been missing the biggest pie in search… for years… I am currently working on tackling that one… if anyone is interested.let me know (just post here)…. bright people only….
Search in the context of current limitations/understanding maybe … but search won’t be solved until I can search for something and get exactly what I wanted on the first result 100% of the time with no fail … right now current limitations in technology don’t allow for that to happen.
Search as we know it is still some automated systems best guess; when it becomes more than that, it will be 100% solved.
2 months from now if I want to refer to this post but I don’t bookmark and tag it now, my puny brain is going to want to find “the blog post by Mike Arrington that had a picture of an old plane at the top,” and I am taken directly here, that would be solving search, for me anways
Interesting how some people can make such strong statements with regards to subjects they know nothing about. If Marissa Mayer had actually read a book on algorithms she would have known that search is not solved by any stretch of the imagination. There are a hundreds of scientific papers published yearly on the subject of search which is hardly solved regardless of what Marissa Mayer says.
Cheers!
But would these algorithms produce more than a 10% improvement to what google’s already doing? Probably not. My point is that Google continues and will continue to tweak it’s algorithms and SEO companies will continue to find ways to the top. But search *as most people use it* (e.g. searching for a single term) will continue to dominate online activity and $ and will remain unchanged.
90% solved … I’m shocked. Search now can be compared to the 3rd generation of computers, lots more to go. Think user intent, think nlp, think social search, think federated content, think user interface, think adaptive search
Comments Pages: [1] 2 » Show All
Leave Comment
Commenting Options
Enter your personal information to the left, or sign in with your Facebook account by clicking the button below.
Alternatively, you can create an avatar that will appear whenever you leave a comment on a Gravatar-enabled blog.