Searching for Perfection

"The biggest problem with web search has always been the human factor," declares Google spokesperson Ezekiel Fring at a Mountain View press conference to introduce the company's new robotics initiative.  "People are simply unable to make logical judgements as to the quality of the sites brought up in any search result - then they blame the search engine because they end up clicking on some crappy site which infects their PC with malware or corrupts their children with porn."  The search giant's solution has been to develop a series of new robots to carry out searches for human users.  "These are autonomous units, uploaded with the latest in Artificial Intelligence, which not only will be able to type in the search terms on behalf of the searcher - using the most efficient and unambiguous wording for the query - but will also interpret the results for the user, clicking only on guaranteed high quality sites," explains Fring. "I suppose you could say that it is an actual, physical, Googlebot!"  The company aims to start producing the new robots next year, with the aim of getting one into every internet-connected home and workplace within a decade.

"We hope that by using our machine learning technology, over time the robots will be able to predict their hosts' search needs, carrying out searches and selecting sites before they even realise that they want to search for something," Fring enthuses. "Think of the time they will be able to save - with the robots even typing in the search terms, people will be able to save an average of two minutes a day!" Google's ultimate aim, apparently, is to make the search process perfect, removing any of the vagaries caused by human interaction with the search interface.  "Our research has shown that the biggest problem with web searches is that, left to their own devices, people search for the wrong things,"  opines Fring.  "By using our robots to, quite literally, take things out of their hands, we will be able to ensure that people only use the search terms which bring up the correct type of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) - those which have a front page composed entirely of results from Amazon, eBay and YouTube, with the second page composed entirely of Blogger blogs recommending the sites on the first page, with everything surrounded by paid ads for the same sites.  These are the very definition of quality results - no ropey independent sellers or information sites trying to sell you or tell you something better, cheaper or different." 

Astonishingly, Fring claims that most of the web is, in fact, a complete waste of time.  "More than ninety percent of the sites out there are completely irrelevant - they aren't selling anything.  They are just full of obscure and esoteric information and opinions.  Either that, or they are trying to be entertaining - if you want entertainment, watch TV,"  he claims.  "For God's sake, most of them aren't even monetized with Google ads!  Why would anyone want to build a website which doesn't make them money?  More to the point, why would anyone waste time looking at them?  The main reason people go online is because they want to buy something and we need to ensure our SERPs reflect this.  It's what we've been trying to do with our algorithm changes over the past few years, but persisted in searching wrongly, meaning these non big-business sites kept getting traffic that rightfully belonged to the likes of Amazon.  The introduction of our search robots will, hopefully, correct this!"