Ok so this will be a little off topic, but I noticed a couple of blog articles highlighting a comment from the Google VP of Search Products saying that search is 90% solved… that I thought was quite odd and worth commenting on.

I am sure it was just one of those goofy comments that she made, that she now wishes she hadn’t made that she is now trying to clarify, which she does a respectable job of via the Official Google Blog. I am equally as sure that back in the 1876 Melvil Dewey said something equally as silly when he came up with the Dewey Decimal System… I am sure it went something like this: “ all knowledge can be categorized into ten core classes and I have devised a perfect hierarchical classification system that can handle an infinite number of new elements. The problem of searching for and finding information is practically solved.” Followed by the off the record comment “woo hoo yeah baby! Now we can go paaaaart-ay!

What Melvil didn’t acknowledge is that not all the worlds’ information would be written into books and stored in large libraries.

What Google is not acknowledging is that not all the worlds’ information is written out and coded and available to be stored in large server farms.

The Google clarification goes on to recognize some key gaps including cross language information sharing, modes of search (like by voice) and personalization… all things that focus on the different methods of getting at and sorting through stuff currently available on web servers. The clarification does not address the problem that the worlds’ information is no more confined to the world of indexable web servers than it was confined to books back in 1876.

Ok getting back to location stuff as an example, a couple of simple things I might like to know in the next few hours are: Where is my bus? Or where is my friend? Or where can I find a great Cuban sandwich within a five minute walk for under $8. Or are there any guys playing basketball at the gym right now? Google search can’t answer any of these questions. Sure, it may be able to get me to a bus schedule of where a bus SHOULD be, or that a Cuban restaurant or a gym exists nearby. But that is quite different than information on the actual location of the bus, or that a deli nearby does great Cuban sandwich, or that the gym even has a basketball court, let alone whether there are people there playing at that moment.

The Google’s of the world still have a lot of work to do to first figure out how to handle all the knowable yet transient (there one moment, but then gone the next) information that exists out there already… and then they can move on to the bigger problem of helping to get information materialized in a way to make it more accessible… scanning books was a start, but I certainly hope it wasn’t then end.