Google's Mayer says search is 90 percent there

In a wide ranging interview with the LA Times last week, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, talked about the company she's worked for the last 10 years. Mayer has seen Google grow from startup mode to worldwide technology force. She covered a lot of ground in the interview, but as TechCrunch pointed out, one particular answer stood out in which she stated that search is practically solved:

"I think there will be a continued focus on innovation, particularly in search," she said. "Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95 percent of the solution, but there is a lot to go in the remaining 10 percent."

Really, she thinks it's that far along? I'm not so sure, especially in the enterprise. And as we move forward, semantic search, better video search technology and increasing innovation will drive dramatic improvements over today's search results. In fact, in July AIIM released a report on enterprise search that found that most enterprise users were unhappy with the state of enterprise search. This is a serious content management issue because if you can't find the content inside the enterprise, it's not doing employees a lick of good.

To give Mayer the benefit of the doubt, perhaps she was talking about consumer search, which is probably much further along than its enterprise counterpart. But 90 to 95 percent is probably still being generous. There's still a lot of garbage in results. There's still a problem when your enter a search with multiple possible meanings, such as "Jaguar," and get cars, animals and operating systems all bunched together (and even Google can't differentiate among the differences in meaning). Yes, Google gets you a good answer a good portion of the time, but there's still a healthy amount of time where it's wrong; it's probably more than 5 to 10 percent of the time.

For more information:
- read the entire LA Times interview

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