Innovation in Web search using artificial intelligence may lead to the day when you could expect the Web to do the tedious tasks for you.

"Search is like oxygen for many people now, and considering Google's breakthroughs in Web document analysis, supercomputing and Internet advertising, it can be easy to think this is as good as it gets. But some entrepreneurs in artificial intelligence (AI) say that Google is not the end of history. Rather, its techniques are a baseline of where we're headed next. For example, one day people will be able to search for the plot of a novel, or list all the politicians who said something negative about the environment in the last five years, or find out where to buy an umbrella just spotted on the street. Techniques in AI such as natural language, object recognition and statistical machine learning will begin to stoke the imagination of Web searchers once again. 'This is the beginning for the Web being at work for you in a smart way, and taking on the tedious tasks for you,' said Alain Rappaport, CEO and founder of Medstory, a search engine for medical information that went into public beta in July. 'The Web and the amount of information is growing at such a pace that it's an imperative to build an intelligent system that leverages knowledge and exploits it efficiently for people,' he added.... Rappaport said one of the more recent progressions in AI has been in moving from relying on humans to catalog connections between various data to programming computers to do the work, or what he calls the automation of knowledge structure. Tom Mitchell, chair of machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University calls it machine learning for statistical language processing, or learning algorithms that allow computers to read text.... Technologies like speech recognition will fuel advances.... The field of AI called computer vision, which encompasses facial detection and recognition, is coming of age for several reasons."

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