Google Wants To Give you Answers you didn't even know you Needed

For all its advertising might, search has always been Google's strong suit. The company's search engine is second to none, and they recently expanded it with an impressive web of semantic information. But for Google, that isn't enough. The company wants to tell you what you are searching for before you even ask. Think Google Now on steroids. Very powerful steroids.

Over the last month, 150 people have been getting a simple message on their Android smartphones: "what did you want to know recently?" The point: to gather as much information about what people are wondering about on a daily basis as possible. That question is asked 8 times a day, at a randomly chosen time.

See, as much as Google is used to find information, there are some things we still don't use it for. We still ask our friends questions, or wonder about how long the line at the grocery store is. Google is preparing for a future where computers are in our faces at all times, however, and to them this is wrong. Jon Wiley, lead user experience designer for Google search certainly thinks so.

Wiley is hoping to build on the direction that Google started with Google Now to incorporate more sensors and more sources of data. Using GPS sensors, for example, you can guesstimate how many people are in a given line. And if the phone sees you headed that way, it could tell you.

Wiley wants our hardware to learn our patterns and understand our minds. That way, whenever we think of a question, the machine is ready for an answer. And to Wiley, we shouldn't even have to ask.

Said Wiley,

We’ve often said the perfect search engine will provide you with exactly what you need to know at exactly the right moment, potentially without you having to ask for it.

Technology Review Photo by : John Lester