I wonder if Google is getting trapped near a local peak.
I watched the video they released on improving search quality yesterday (http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-qualit...) and was initially impressed that they gave so much thought to slightly improving a small subset of 0.1% of queries. That meeting must have had 40 people attending!
But afterwards it left me with the feeling that Google is becoming so big and entrenched in old ways of doing things, that they may not be focusing enough on the next big improvement in search. Penalties and heuristics can only go so far -- eventually they'll need something approaching AI -- and if any company can do it it's Google.
I don't know if you have any concrete idea in mind, with what AI Google should to approach AI, but Google does fund a lot of research in Information Retrieval and other subfields of AI (machine translation, machine learning, ...).
If you were thinking more along the lines of: "you ask a question and it understands your question and answers it like a human would", then I can tell you that this would require a scientific breakthrough first. That is not really something that you can plan for. Also Google mainly excels in engineering, less so in research. I actually think that Yahoo and Microsoft have stronger research divisions.
I watched the video they released on improving search quality yesterday (http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-qualit...) and was initially impressed that they gave so much thought to slightly improving a small subset of 0.1% of queries. That meeting must have had 40 people attending!
But afterwards it left me with the feeling that Google is becoming so big and entrenched in old ways of doing things, that they may not be focusing enough on the next big improvement in search. Penalties and heuristics can only go so far -- eventually they'll need something approaching AI -- and if any company can do it it's Google.