Search is not 90% solved

In a recent interview for the Los Angels Times Marissa Mayer stated that although search is an unsolved problem, she belives that Google has 90 to 95% of the solution. In her own words:

Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95% of the solution, but there is a lot to go in the remaining 10%.

Well, I’m quite sure that that is not close to the truth. This month Google is turning ten and while it’s true that as a company they expanded quickly and reinvented themselves with a series of new exciting products it’s not so true that the search engine´s value kept up with the shares growth.

Since the company went public in 2004 almost nothing has changed in the way people searched for information over the internet. It’s true that there was iGoogle and that the homepage was revamped but how did it really change the way you searched online? It didn’t.

Google is losing focus. It’s acting a bit like Microsoft, trying to win on all fronts and forgetting their goal. In the beginning it was all about searching, to organize the world’s information, and doing no evil. Employees were focused and united in turn of a unique common goal and that was pretty much the secret to their enormous success. Today Google is no more “the search engine”… it’s the webmail provider, the online video community, the IM application, the web browser, the picture’s manager… almost any web-based application you can think of has a Google counterface. And the loss of focus is not their only threat. As any quickly-grown company would, Google fears that significant changes in the look or algorithm of the search engine will drive some users away. On CBS 60 Minutes, Sergey Brin implicitly admitted it. Because of that the majority of their new ideas never get implemented. But is that because it’s all done in web searching?

No. As Michael Arrington wrote there are a lot of areas in web search that are yet to be developed. Semantic search, for instance, is now being actively researched at Microsoft after they bought Powerset. But there are a lot of other areas like media search, being able to search for something you listen on a video and actually find the video, better organized results and new ways of finding exactly what you want and not only a bunch of links that contain the words you typed in a form.

So Marissa, maybe for you it’s all done and it’s time to develop a browser today and an OS tomorrow (who knows?) but for the rest of the world there is yet much to be done. Google don’t forget you’re the search engine.