"What is remarkable here is not that a search like this didn't quite work the first time, but the expectation that it should have."

"Without context, we are stuck in what futurist Paul Saffo calls the ""Boolean prison of search""."

"As John Battelle, author of The Search, says, ""Search is now more than a web destination and a few words plugged into a box."

"Search has become embedded into everything, and has reached well beyond its web-based roots."

"We once used search engines to look for information, now we use search to find us -- what once seemed transactional now seems an extension of ourselves."

"As a scientist I can say 'understand' is a poorly understood concept,"" says Singhal. ""Even how you and I understand something is not well understood."""

"Google will understand that these things are not simply matching sequences but that they are ""things"" with an internet life and place and history of their own"

"And it will do so via increasingly sophisticated methods: ""be it understanding your speech, your gestures, or what you are looking at,"" says Singhal."

"""We're in a world where almost everything is at your fingertips,"" says Giannandrea. ""But how do you go through it all?"""

"The work of the semantic graph is to make the connections that ­traditional search might overlook."

"""You'd be surprised at how many times there's a serendipitous link between two different things,"""

"As much as trying to know everything, the Knowledge Graph is about trying to work out what you want to know, parsing the disambiguation (""did you mean?"") and filtering noise."

"With the Knowledge Graph, Google has taken a different step towards the future of search: providing answers, not links."

"As Greg Linden, who invented Amazon's recommendation engines and founded Findory notes, says, ""I don't think we'll ever get to the semantic web as it was envisioned -- detailed labelling and descriptions of web pages by humans -- but we are getting closer to its goal: deep descriptions and understanding of the web, through artificial intelligence and natural language understanding."""

"These are the pillars of Google's future of search: the vast knowledge of user behaviour and intent it already has and is compiling every second; the Knowledge Graph, in which strings become things; and Google's advances in artificial intelligence."

"""A link is not at all an answer,"" says Oren Etzioni, professor of computer science at the University of Washington and founder of Decide, a search engine that analyses optimal purchase options and timing."

"""We've been conditioned by years of using Google to think it is."" A pizza inquiry, he suggests, ""is treated by a search engine as information retrieval."

"Singhal believes that search is best done on a mobile device"

"""a process running by [our] side. The perfect assistant."""

"Dyson notes that Bill Gates told her: ""the future of search is verbs."""

"People, the argument goes, want search to do things, not just suggest things."

"Reuniting our digital lives into one platform that is searchable is, to me, the largest problem we face today."""

"""You can call it whatever you want. This is what the human brain would like to have by its side, when you're seeking information, or sometimes information comes to you without your seeking it."""

"1. Spider Dispatch"

"Like many search engines, Google uses ""spiders"", robot programs that scan new and updated pages and index every word (except ""a"", ""an"" and ""the"")."

"2. Indexing"

"The index doesn't contain just keywords, but also metadata: information on whether the keywords were capitalised, their font size, and where on the page they were found (in the title, subtitle or lower down), in order to help rank the importance of the page."

"3. Ranking"

"It rates a page's importance based on the number and reputation of links that pointed to them."

"4. Definition"

"The algorithm uses over 200 signals to refine a search query. These include a website's PageRank, a searcher's geographic location, which links they usually click, how they modify their search queries when they are unsatisfied and their search history."