Google has a confession to make: It does not understand you. If
you ask it “the 10 deepest lakes in the U.S,” it will give you a
very good result based on the keywords in the phrase and sites
with significant authority on those words and even word
groupings, but Google Fellow and SVP Amit Singhal says Google
doesn’t understand the question. “We cross our fingers and hope
someone on the web has written about these things or topics.”
The future of Google Search, though, could be a very different
story. In an extensive conversation, Singhal, who has been in
the search field for 20 years, outlined a developing vision for
search that takes it beyond mere words and into the world of
entities, attributes and the relationship between those
entities. In other words, Google’s future search engine will not
only understand your lake question but know a lake is a body of
water and tell you the depth, surface areas, temperatures and
even salinities for each lake. To understand where Google is
going, however, you need to kn