The Phone I carry in my Pocket is more Powerful than the Desktop Computer I used in 1998
Every year, Google takes some time out from their so-called busy schedule to convey 
something which runs down till next year – it’s called Founder’s Letters. This time around,
Here is a small snippet of what’s in store (I guess you’ll feel good about it if you’re a $GOOG fan). Also interesting is his take on real-time search computing, though subtly he hints that what’s in his mind:
Search remains at the very core of what we do at Google, just as it has been from our earliest days. As the scale has changed dramatically over the years, the presentation and quality of our search results have also undergone many changes since 1998. In the past year alone we have made 359 changes to our web search — nearly one per day. Some are not easy to spot, such as changes in ranking based on personalization (launched broadly in 2005) but they are important in getting the most relevant search results. Others are very easy to see and improve search efficiency in a very clear way, such as spelling correction, annotations, and suggestions.
…there are important areas in which I wish we had made more progress. Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant. However, I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that “understands” more of the queries and documents than we do today. Others claim to have accomplished this (I don’t know if he means Twitter and its recent developments), and Google’s systems have more smarts behind the curtains than may be apparent from the outside, but the field as a whole is still shy of where I would have expected it to be. Part of the reason is the dramatic growth of the web — for any particular query, it is likely there are many documents on the topic using the exact same vocabulary. And as the web grows, so does the breadth and depth of the curiosity of those searching. I expect our search engine to become much “smarter” in the coming decade.
Interesting huh. At first look, if I’m correct that Sergey is not taking twitter seriously, then caveats galore for sure. Real-time search is already here. If you don’t agree then ask those bloggers who have been a surge in search query with twitter being the primary refferer. And my hunch is it’s only going to grow further and not abate soon.
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