There’s an interview with Esther Dyson at Online Media Daily (registration may be required) from earlier this month at the Search Insider Summit. I can’t say that it’s riveting but what I do find interesting is how much her take on where search is going (“[In the context of travel and hotel booking] a personal assistant that will find out where you want to go, a hotel with a swimming pool that opens at such a time prior to my meeting…”) sounds like the ambitions we all had ten years ago for pretty much everything we built.
In terms of constructing a personal search assistant (again, a curious echo of the ambitions of the nineties) that would know everything about you, what you need, what your schedule is, what your favourite kind of bedsheets are, she sees us as being still fairly far away. “I could construct something that would do that but it would probably break the first time someone else tried to use it.”
Oh, and she also provides her own particular contribution to Fear Of Google when she answers the question of the place of the Big Double-Oh in the Search of the Future with “I think that Google is [the future].”
Apparently she spends a lot of time in Russia these days. And Sergey is called Sergey, y’know? Are we supposed to be joining dots here?
