By Steve Rosenbush \u2014 The Wall Street Journal<\/p>\n
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Within five to eight years, search engines will start to appear much more human-like, according to Google<\/a> Inc.GOOG<\/span> +1.51%<\/span><\/a><\/span> engineering chief Ray Kurzweil. They will respond to long and complex questions, understand the meaning of the documents they are searching, and be on the look-out for information they think might be useful to people. These advances will lead to improved problem-solving, not just for punctual questions, but for longer-term projects, he said.<\/p>\n The Google search engine of today ranks pages according to the number of times they have been cited by other pages. \u201cLarry and Sergey applied page rank to Web pages. If a lot of other pages point to it, then it must be an important page. And that\u2019s worked very well,\u201d Mr. Kurzweil said Monday evening at the Wall Street Journal CIO Network conference in San Diego, where he was interviewed on stage by Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker. Mr. Kurzweil is developing a new kind of search. \u201cGoogle has already taken steps toward actually understanding the meaning and it can read with a little bit of understanding. That\u2019s basically what I\u2019m working on, to actually understand the content of the Web pages.\u201d<\/p>\n