What can you do beyond just using the keywords to give the users what they want?

You can look at the distribution of keywords in the document. You can look at the distribution of other words on the page. You can look at words on similar topics on the page. You can look at words that other people use to point to this page, and how related they are to the keywords -- things like that.

What's the toughest part of improving searching?

I think the hardest issue is determining what the user really wants, figuring out, when someone types in "car," whether he wants used cars. Does he want the Kelley Blue Book? Or does he want to buy a car? Understanding better what users want -- that's the hardest challenge.

When a query is a little bit more specific -- take, for example, "car repair Palo Alto" -- then we can say, OK now, we sort of understand. But we're still not 100 percent sure. Does he just want different car repair places? Or does he want the one closest to his house?

We do know that we should make sure not to return a page that's a report about a trip to California and then they had to have their car repaired in Palo Alto.

You can try to return documents that are specifically on this topic. We're developing more sophisticated techniques to return documents that might not mention the query words, but are [still relevant to] the topic. We're getting away from just pure word matches and getting more into topics.

But one also has to be a little careful there because the more sophisticated users like having complete control, while the more naive users like having the system help as much as possible.

We can't completely rewrite the query into something that we think is more appropriate, because, you know, people like my husband would get crazy. He just wants to find pages that have his words.

So you have to strike a balance.

People have been trained for a long time now by search engines [to expect] that if they type in search terms they'll get documents that contain those search terms. Now, if you start doing something better for them or that's different to them, then you better explain [why] it's worth it.

What other kinds of search are you developing?

We have a voice-search project with BMW -- BMW wants to put voice search into their 7 Series cars. They want to put microphones in the cars -- you can just speak whatever your search is and then it gives you answers back on a display. Then you just say the result number and the search jumps to that result.

And then you crash?

It might only do the search when the car is stopped or something like that. They don't know yet when they would enable it; right now it's just, Can we do it at all?

And the other push is languages. The vision is that no matter what language your query is in, and no matter what language the document is in, we should [be able to] find the document for you and translate it for you. We have a translation service that just started, but it only translates another language into English. So currently you can translate German into English or English into German, but you cannot translate German into French.

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