News service IDG recently spoke to Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, Melissa Meyer, about a recent statement she made to the effect that Google was aiming to develop the "perfect search engine."
Meyer told the news service that the perfect search engine would be one "that could understand speech, phrases, what entities you’re talking about, concepts. It would be able to search all of the world’s information, [find] different ideas and concepts, and bring them back to you in a presentation that was really informative and coherent."
Responding to a question about semantic search – as opposed to the algorithmic search that most search engines currently use and which makes search engine optimization (SEO) possible – Meyer asserted that semantic search is difficult to scale and that sufficiently advanced algorithmic search can appear to understand semantics on its own.
Google has been working towards the so-called Universal Search engine since it was announced in 2007. In the meantime, however, Google remains the dominant force in the online search market – and the primary target for search engine optimization (SEO).
