Sergey Brin reflects on the state of search

Sergey Brin is proud of Google's achievements, but says more can be done to improve search

Google founder Sergey Brin has shared his thoughts on the progress of the web search market.

The Google founder spoke of each of the company's ventures in the annual founder's letter issued by the company every year at its shareholder meeting.

The letter touched on everything from YouTube to the company's Chrome web browser, but much of Brin's attention was focused on the company's flagship search business.

"When I was a child, researching anything involved a long trip to the local library and good deal of luck that one of the books there would be about the subject of interest," Brin wrote.

"I could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds."

Brin said that, while much progress has been made regarding search in recent years, there were still areas that needed improvement. He noted that search engines have struggled with adding contextual features into results, which could be improved.

"While I am proud of what has been accomplished in search over the past decade, there are important areas in which I wish we had made more progress," he wrote.

"Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant."

While the company has recently put much of its muscle behind developing contextual search systems, Brin suggested that advanced search would need to be further developed over the next 10 years as hardware power increases.

"Computers will be 100 times faster still, and storage will be 100 times cheaper," he predicted. "Many of the problems that we call artificial intelligence today will become accepted as standard computational capabilities, including image processing, speech recognition and natural language processing. "