Much as we swapped from 'txt spk' to full sentences when predictive text came and saved us from the convenience-driven demise of the human language, soon we may be able to stop our jilted search engine jargon, too.
I can't think of the amount of times I have sat watching a film, then searched a character's name to find out what other films the actor has appeared in. Often i've had to navigate quickly to IMDB and look it up myself, but now Google is catching up with our curiosity. The speed with which we can find these answers will drastically increase as the search engine gains the ability to understand more complex syntax.
The race to master Artificial Intelligence in technology is definitely on, as many companies compete to push us through to that next step, and into a reality that Back to the Future could only have dreamed of.
It's fascinating to think that in years to come, schools will be teaching a history which involves the evolution of technology, and children will be incredulous that there was once a world without it.
Google is now seeking to understand the meaning of questions, rather than simply understanding each component of a phrase individually. "We can now break down a query to understand the semantics of each piece," it said in a blog post announcing the changes to search. "So now we can get at the intent behind the entire question. That lets us traverse the Knowledge Graph much more reliably to find the right facts and compose a useful answer. And we can build on this base to answer harder questions." Google can now handle a number of different types of complex questions -- superlatives (such as 'who is the tallest member of One Direction?'), time based questions (like 'what songs did the Clash release in 1977?') and more complex combinations.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-11/17/google-smart-search-complex-phrases
