In the not-so-distant future, you’ll be walking down the street and your phone will beep and offer you a few lunch suggestions just around the corner, or it might tell you that the museum across the street is having an exhibit of that artist you once Googled: That’s Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s vision of the future, Computerworld reports. In a keynote address at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Schmidt said that at some point in the future, Google’s search technology will be autonomous, meaning it will offer users search results even before they’ve looked for them. “While it sounds like science fiction to suggest that technology can help search for things you don’t even yet know you need, the opportunities to improve human discovery are very real in the future,” said Augie Ray, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Combining a person’s context — where they are, who they’re with — with their past opinions and actions, and the opinions and actions of others, can create tremendous value for people.” Autonomous search would take your past experiences, likes and dislikes and use them, along with geolocation information, to give you information about things that might interest you wherever you might be. Analysts say this kind of technology could be a reality within five years. However, it could be a big drain on the battery life of mobile devices.
But the bigger issue could be privacy. For this type of search technology to work, your phone and Google would need to know where you are all the time. And many people might have a big problem with that…
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