Where do you see search engines heading in the near and far future, and what do you think are the biggest hurdles to overcome from a developer’s perspective?
Sorry, I’m not very imaginative here. My prediction is that the web search in the coming decade is going to look more-or-less like web search of today. It’s a safe bet. Web search evolved quickly for the first few years. It started in 1994 with WebCrawler, using standard information retrieval methods. The development of more web-specific methods took a few years, culminating in Google’s 1998 launch. Since then, the introduction of new methods has slowed dramatically. The low-hanging fruit has been harvested. Innovation is easy when an area is young, and becomes more difficult as it field matures. Web search grew up in the 1990s, is now a cash cow, and will soon be a commodity. As far as development challenges, I think operational reliability is a big one. We’re working on developing something like GFS, the Google Filesystem. Stuff like this is essential to large-scale web search: you cannot let a failure of any single component cause a major hiccough; you must be able to easily scale b
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