Everytime someone from Google speaks, we need to listen carefully. Eric Schmidt’s latest comments reported by TechCrunch include this little gem. He was asked to look 10 years out, and what the future Google looks like. He answers that Google will determine the best, most authoritative site for a given question, read it, and summarize it back to the Google user as “the answer”
Yeah, that’s a scary proposition, but also a stupid one. Really…how often is there just one answer? And isn’t this (sort of) what Wikipedia does already. What Schmidt is completely missing is that the web is becoming more and more about conversations, not facts. Even when I want an answer to a technical question, I’d rather read it in the form of a tutorial example as opposed to the manual.
Tutorials are to manuals what historical novels are to textbooks.
Besides, it seems like facts are becoming less and less relevant…at least to the web.
May as well give my post about how to draw flies some Google juice while I’m at it.