Google's acquisition of DeepMind for $400 - $500 million is another symptom that the next big war in tech is for true Artificial Intelligence that will make Google's current core product, "search," look like a primitive offering that we'll all laugh about in the same way we chuckle over the fact that the original Apple II computer came with a cassette tape for data storage, decades ago.
This war will be fierce. There are signs that companies like Yahoo, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft all regard Google's core search offering as a potential long-term weakness if it doesn't evolve fast enough.
When people think about Google and search, they don't think "weakness." Google dominates search, consistently fielding around 70% of all searches on the web.
The problem is that those searches areon the web, and increasingly humans need to find things that are outside the web or shielded from it.
There are a bunch of new things that Google is actually quite bad at searching, such as Facebook, Twitter, app stores, and data that lives inside apps. Those are not small areas of the online world - they're arguably the future of it.
One way to think about search is to regard it the way that humans will interact with machines in the future. Now, we need to find some information, so we punch keywords into Google's search box. A lot of people in tech, however, regard this as a feeble way to interact with machines. They look at old episodes of Star Trek, in which the characters talk with and interrogate the star ship's computer, and think that maybe most people would rather interact with machines like that: in normal, conversational language.
More than that, an intelligent machine would be able to anticipate your needs before you request them - making the overt act of searching obsolete because the machine has already recognized the semantics, or meaning, of your behavior and figured out what information to present to you, when you need it.
http://www.businessinsider.in/Googles-DeepMind-Acquisition-Shows-How-Its-Dominance-Of-Search-Could-Be-A-Long-Term-Weakness/articleshow/29453398.cms
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