Google best guess

Posted September 30, 2011 at 1:16 pm by Akshay

It looks like Google has advanced their decision engine aspect of search. This has always been there, but was more like a command line response to specific search queries. Historically the search engine parsed a finite list of such commands for search queries like movie show times, currency conversion etc.

However, now they have now expanded this feature into the realm of providing a machine guessed answer like this:

On one hand, it would be exciting to see how search engines evolve into decision engines and thereby a content endpoint in order to gain user retention. Secondly the decision engine aspect also seems a start of fundamental battle between machine processing (prediction, modeling, AI) vs use of social graph in decision making (like how FB shows ads for things you have liked in past)