Google’s Senior VP in charge of Search likes to say that “search is not a solved problem”. There’s no doubt that Google moved the world a lot closer to solving that problem by indexing the world’s information and making it searchable. However, the problem it is now facing is that search is more than typing a few words in a search box. Search is full of context, and may include images, video and sound. So Google is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to continue to evolve the way we search for information online.
At their recent ‘Search On’ event, the search giant made a number of announcements that give some indication on where their ambitions lie. Google Lens is critical to these plans. Broken a part of your bike, but don’t know what to call it when typing in search? Google Lens will be able to let you search visually. Then looking for instructions to fix it? Rather than taking you to static web pages, Google’s AI will be able to direct you to the best YouTube video to watch how to fix it. Google is also building a ‘things to know’ section, so they will also be serving up contextually relevant information about that bike part and how you can fix it.
These are all steps in Google’s efforts to catalogue all of the world’s information and make it searchable. With the masses of data coming in from these searches, we should expect their AI and machine learning algorithms to continue getting smarter and more accurate in being able to provide the most relevant information, whatever we’re searching for.
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