Bing Director Stefan Weitz On The Future Of Search (VIDEO)

Bing director Stefan Weitz, who is shaping Microsoft's search engine as it goes head to head with Google's, predicts search will disappear in the next few years.

Search engines will not cease to exist, but their tasks will become less and less visible and more and more intuitive, Weitz said.

"The future of search is that it won't be search anymore," Weitz explained during an interview with HuffPostTech. "The future of search is that the box you've come to know and love...won't be the constraining factor. Literally everywhere you go, every device you have, everything you touch will conduct a search, whether you know it or not."

Weitz argued that within ten years, the search box will be "as antiquated as a rotary dial phone," while search will be the "invisible agent."

He described a future two to three years away in which a user could wear glasses equipped with vision recognition technology that display the profile of any person the user comes into contact with, calling up their conversation history and other personal--but private--information.

"Search will become more implicit and more contextual," Weitz said. "It will be happening all the time on your behalf...There is this ability for us to...stop thinking about the web as a collection of pages, which is how it was designed initially, and think about the web more as a representation of the physical world in a digital format. "

Bing, which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg praised for its scrappiness and inventiveness, has gained share in recent months, though Google, which claims over 54 percent of searches to Bing's 13 percent, remains far and away the market leader in the U.S.

Asked to forecast what the next big idea will be, Weitz said he envisions self-assembling machines catalyzing major societal changes.

He described a kidney-printing machine Dr. Anthony Atala demonstrated at the 2011 TED conference as "one of the most stunning things I've ever seen in my life," noting that self-assembling machines offer the potential to "remove a lot of constraints we have in society around scarcity."

See HuffPostTech's interview with Weitz below, and check back for more videos from the discussion.

WATCH:

Video by HuffPost's Hunter Stuart

Comments

[seomarketingllc]

08:29 PM on 04/10/2011

Great post. I want Bing to step it up. Tired of Google being the top dog. I would like to say that Yahoo and Bing now hae the same algo. Read more at seo blog http://www.seocompanyservices.com/search-engine-optimization/

[Thom Lexus]

09:04 PM on 04/06/2011

see this startup:

http://FRUGALIC.com

enebales DEVICES toSELF-DESCRIBE, SELF-BUILD SELF-LISTINGS of THEMSELVES in eCommerce marketpalce. What this guys is talking about seems coming to eCommerce NOW.

[Adam Bomb]

05:12 PM on 04/06/2011

Who needs privacy when everything can be COMPLETELY AWESOME?!?

[bessielil]

04:27 PM on 04/06/2011

I'm picturing everyone who works at the TSA wearing those glasses, as we file past (baaaaaa) because we have to catch a plane. Uh, oh. Not a vision that is at all appealing.

[jt1980]

02:58 AM on 04/05/2011

One can make search easier and less cumbersome, but making it go away completely? Dream on. Push technology tends to annoy people (one reason why Firefox' ad blocking add-ons are so popular), and information overload will drive people nuts, especially when they are not looking for the information in the first place.

[NHBill]

02:39 PM on 04/04/2011

Talk about no privacy!

[minxymoggy]

02:29 PM on 04/04/2011

I remember reading a book by Bill Gates called Business at the Speed of Light just before the year 2000. At the time it seemed like a load of BS. Intelligent tablet devices that need no mouse, keyboard or cables? Yeah right.

Actually a lot of it has happened, although Microsoft's part in realising it has become less as Apple have innovated more on the hardware side and various companies and start ups have innovated more in SaaS, Cloud computing and communications software (now known as social networking).

One of the areas Bill never really covered well in that book was search...

Regardless of whether the future of search is brain powered or not, one thing I would *love* to see in it's future is more diversity. Bing still has a long haul to go, yet everything they do that pushes forwards helps keep innovation coming.

[NHBill]

02:41 PM on 04/04/2011

"Actually a lot of it has happened, although Microsoft' s part in realising it has become less as Apple have innovated more on the hardware side"

Actually Apple just buys parts form vendors.
It's their Software that is responsible for Apple's success.
Apple is a world class software company that makes hardware to meet it's standards.

[minxymoggy]

02:55 PM on 04/04/2011

I totally agree, I was simply glossing over a much deeper subject for the sake of brevity.

Of course whether Windows Mobile will start to shape Nokia handsets to it's standards in the future is a whole new debate... =)

[jt1980]

03:03 AM on 04/05/2011

I don't think the thought having a tablet device in 2000 was not that groundbreaking. The Palm Pilot came out in 1997. It has a stylus, and allows users to draw on the screen surface, and has a wonderful writing recognition software. Apple came out with the much-derided, but ambitious Newton in 1998. Gates just expanded on the theme, but the general design was already there by 2000.

[huffdog]

01:45 PM on 04/04/2011

No wonder they are fading with insight like that.

[ramblingjohnny]

12:23 PM on 04/04/2011

I guess the corporation that never managed to get a big piece of the search market would believe that but that does not make it true!

[idonthinkso]

11:56 AM on 04/04/2011

this should have been labeled as what it is: an advertisement. shame.

[Silverwolf72]

11:40 AM on 04/04/2011

Yes Microsoft will be connected strait to your brain and nothing will be unknown to them. Wow sounds like a great future!
Then it crashes and you your brain is fried.

[J0E1]

10:44 AM on 04/04/2011

Yea like bing is going to be the pioneer in anything search related in the next 10 years..

[keysoftheraw]

09:09 AM on 04/04/2011

Where is my dude Matt Cutts? This article is like asking Boost Mobile to predict the future of phones, and forgetting about AT&T...