Google users promised artificial intelligence

location based services

A search engine that knows exactly what you are looking for, that can understand the question you are asking even better than you do, and find exactly the right information for you, instantly - that was the future predicted by Google yesterday.
Speaking at a conference for Google's European partners, entitled Zeitgeist '06, on the outskirts of London last night Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and co-founder Larry Page gave an insight into perhaps the most ambitious project the Californian business is undertaking - artificial intelligence (AI).

"The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world. It would understand everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly," Mr Page told an audience of the digerati representing firms from Warner Music and AOL to BSkyB and the BBC. "You could ask 'what should I ask Larry?' and it would tell you."

"We have people mad enough to spend their time doing this today," he added. "Even they don't think they will be finished any time soon."

Speaking after what was tabled an end of day 'fireside chat', Mr Page said one thing he had learned since Google launched eight years ago was that technology can change faster than expected and AI could be a reality within a few years.

Certainly in that short period of time, Google has gone from a start-up in Mountain View to one of the most recognised brands in the world. As evidence of its meteoric rise, the Hertfordshire hotel in which the conference took place was also home last night to the England football team. The post-conference press roundtable was briefly interrupted by England assistant manager Steve McLaren who had evidently got the wrong room.

Google's executives were forced to defend their tactics. While suggesting the business could one day capture a 20% share of the $800bn (£424bn) global advertising market, Mr Schmidt explained that the apparently scatter-gun approach to research that lets engineers spend a fifth of their time working on pet projects, also allows the company to innovate faster than any rival.

While this has created some products (such as shopping service Froogle) that have not been a great success, it also led to the Gmail email service which despite still being only in test form is rapidly catching up with market leaders such as Hotmail.

But Mr Schmidt admitted that the company is spending more energy than perhaps it has in the past on integrating some of these seemingly random ventures back into its core revenue-generating search tool, something that could be seen as a sea change within the business, though Google executives maintain it is not going through a major consolidation phase.

But the lack of a visible pipeline of development from Google - which never gives a clear indication of what it is working on until it is released - infuriates some of its stockholders, who would rather it concentrated on a few lucrative services.

"We are very clear and I want to be clear and on the record," said Mr Schmidt. "We run the company for the benefit of our end-users globally."

Looking at the current court case in Houston where Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, former executives of collapsed energy giant Enron, await the outcome of their trial for fraud, he added: "Speaking as an American company chief executive, when the management team starts focusing on the stock price rather than focusing on its business and customers you get a really bad outcome. We are focused on doing the right thing for the long-term"

Mr Schmidt also attacked recent suggestions from some major US cable companies that providers of capacity-hungry internet services - such as video and TV - should be charged to run their services over the web. This presents a challenge to what is generally seen as the internet's neutrality, that everyone should be able to get on to it, he said.

"We believe this violates one of the founding principles that built the internet today and it could stifle the next wave of innovation."

In fact Google is currently working on its own video tool. While adamant that the company is not looking to get into the provision of content itself, it is looking to produce a video tool that will allow broadband TV viewers to find the shows they want from the hundreds that are available across the world. It is looking for media partners interested in using such a tool.

Mr Schmidt also had a few consoling words for the traditional media business which sees its profitability being utterly eroded by online rivals. He said usage of traditional media placed online is rising rapidly, but circulations - the revenue generator - are declining. "You don't have a lack of audience problem, you have a business model problem," he said.