I recently joined a google experiment to try out different views on search results. Since I did a little bit of work on UI’s and presentation of search results, I was quite interested to see what google would come up with in place of the usual top 10 search results. Little did I know that google would unveil technology that would predict the future !!!
Here is a results page for the query “tim durham” and google is returning results all the way from 2010 through 2060! Now let me try and see if google can predict the next president! It does provide me with results all the way from 1850 to 2160…way too prescient for me!!
All the kidding aside, the technology was actually quite smart. Contrary to what I initially expected, that google was picking up any 4 digit number and thinking it was a date, most of these search results did have dates that were in the future. However, there is a big difference between the mention of a date and the date associated with the document. Getting the date in context is a much harder problem I think, but one I guess google hopes to solve.
Filed under: search
