While many of the points ring true about the nature of search, such as, "According to our research, only 1 in 4 web queries you do gets you a satisfactory answer," I think his solution to the problem is off base, far off at best, and most likely inconceivable.
He envisions a world where search engines will be able to understand our language so thoroughly that people will be able to enter in a few words and get the results they are looking for.
He says that this functionality is far off. It is. It is hard to imagine a search engine that can understand how people speak, by country, by region... Sentence structure is highly variable with where a person lives, even when speaking the same language, and it is hard to imagine a search engine that can understand how each person speaks.
Maybe there is some sci-fi cap that you need to put on before searching.... Okay, that scares me.
To illustrate his point on the difficulty that search engines have, Pedersen says, "Today, if you ask a search engine for 'recent, positive reviews of the Amazon Kindle,' it will completely ignore the nuances of the request because it understands relatively little of what we say."
Agreed. A search engine, if you just do a basic search, will give you garbage results if you enter in those key words.
Apparently Jan Pedersen doesn't understand all of the filters and operators available on Google.
Do the following:
1. On Google, type in "Amazon Kindle" ~good. Press search
2. Click the show options button.
3. Select Reviews
4. Select past week (or enter your own date range).
See the image below, or see the results in Google
And while there are some irrelevant results in there, I'd just remove them using Not Search.
So, short of waiting for the folks in Redmond or Mountain View to come with a way to be able to read our minds, I'd suggest just paying attention to the search filters and operators that Google already supports.
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