The talk started with a bit of a pat on the back for those working on search, with Bruce saying that "search is everywhere" -- not just the web, but enterprise, desktop, product catalogs, and many other places -- and, despite hard problems of noisy data and vocabulary mismatch between what searchers actually want and how they express that to a search engine, search seems to do a pretty good job.
But then, Bruce took everyone to task, saying that current search is nothing like the "vision of the future" that was anticipated decades back. We still are nowhere near a software agent that can understand and fulfill complex information needs like a human expert would. Bruce said the "hard problems remain very hard" and that search really only works well when searchers are easily able to translate their goals into "those little keywords".
To get to that vision, Bruce argued that we need to be "evolutionary, not revolutionary". Keep chipping away at the problem. Bruce suggested long queries as a particularly promising "next step toward the vision of the future", saying that long queries work well "for people [not] for search engines", and discussed a few approaches using techniques similar to statistical machine translation.
It may have been that he ran short on time, but I was disappointed that Bruce did not spend more time talking about how to make progress toward the grand vision of search. A bit of this was addressed in the questions at the end. One person asked about whether search should be more of a dialogue between the searcher and the search engine. Another asked about user interface innovations that might be necessary. But, in general, it would have been interesting to hear more about what new paths Bruce considers promising and which of the techniques currently used he considers to be dead ends.
On a side note, there was a curious contrast between Bruce's approach of "evolutionary not revolutionary" and the "Mountains or the Street Lamp" talk during industry day. In that talk, Chris Burges argued that we should primarily focus on very hard problems we have no idea how to solve -- climb the mountains -- not twiddles to existing techniques -- look around nearby in the light under the street lamp.
Bruce's keynote talk should appear on videolectures.net in a couple weeks.
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