“The search industry is in the early stages of a disruptive period of change,” Kevin Kelleher writes for Fortune. “It will look more like Siri than Google does today — that is, it will have a more intuitive AI feel to it. Apple and Google — and maybe even Microsoft — will play a key role in shaping it. Which means it’s well past time to be worrying about whether Google is a monopoly.”
“Apple has found a way to advance search in an equally dramatic way: Siri. There’s no search box to type into. You just ask,” Kelleher writes. “But Siri is more than voice recognition. It’s a form of AI that takes a few more steps closer to an app that could pass the Turing test. People are still uncomfortable with any AI application that could be mistaken for a human, but the Easter-egg answers Apple has snuck into the app defuses any potential discomfort, and in fact gives Siri a conversational interface that feels far more personal that Google’s spartan home page.”
Kelleher writes, “It’s that conversational interface that poses the threat to Google. No longer is the search box the front-end of searches on the iPhone 4S. Google is the back-end technology that is suddenly less visible. Or rather, one of the back ends. Because of the rise of specialized searches like Yelp and Wolfram|Alpha, Siri can easily bypass Google’s search algorithms for many queries… The question isn’t whether Siri is a search engine that can replace Google’s search box. It’s a different kind of search — that is, it’s the future of search.”
Read more in the full article here.
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