MIT Technology Review has a great article that elaborates on some of the points I made a couple of weeks ago about Google’s future.

Two bits in particular caught my attention:

One emerging feature of [the next version of Windows], called Implicit Query, would work in the background to retrieve information related to whatever the user is working on. If you’re reading an e-mail message, for example, Implicit Query might display a box with links to the titles and e-mail addresses of all the people whom the message mentions, and to all of your previous e-mail from the sender. To make the software even more useful, Dumais is working on adding an item to the two-button mouse’s standard Windows right-click menu that would be labeled “Find me stuff like this” and would search both personal and Web data for information related to a highlighted name or phrase.

This Microsoft “innovation” is already available to Linux hackers: it’s called Dashboard.

The other bit was the Google CTO’s opinion about where search is headed:

Silverstein thinks information retrieval experts should aim high, building software that is every bit as good at pointing users toward the specific resources they need as a well-trained reference librarian. That, of course, will require major advances in fields such as probabilistic machine learning and natural-language processing—and Google continues to hire some of the best new PhDs in those areas, including four recent graduates from the Stanford laboratory of Daphne Koller, a leading machine-learning researcher.

Professor Koller was my advisor at Stanford. I worked in her lab for about eight months, primarily on work to combine the structure of traditional knowledge representation techniques with the reasoning power of Bayesian networks. I believe this work has developed into her group’s current work on Probabilistic Relational Models. Maybe if I hadn’t strayed from the CS path, I would be working at Google now too…

But anyway, my point is that Google may actually be looking too far ahead. Hiring the world’s most brilliant PhD’s doesn’t guarantee you’ll get any useful innovations: look at Microsoft Research. Google, by focusing only on “making the machine smarter” instead of a more holistic view of search (the classic AI researcher’s tunnel vision), might have all the answers for search in 2015, but do they have them for search in 2005?