Google to provide search results before you search

Google has not abandoned the idea of providing results before search and in fact, the search giant has reiterated that it's working what it calls as 'contextual discovery' which will give users search results before they even know they want them, reports Sharon Gaudin from computerworld.

The concept revolves around the idea of being able to look at either a person's browsing profile or their location profile and serving up interesting data to them without them searching for anything.

Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Location Services at Google said the company is working on giving users results without the search at the LeWeb '10 conference in Paris. "The idea is to push information to people," said Mayer, during an on-stage interview. "It's location in context. Inside the browser and a toolbar, we can look at where people have been going on the Web - then we deliver it. But it's a big UI challenge."

Google aims to provide information based on a user's location on mobile phone while on PC, the search results would pop up in a panel on the browser complementing the user's own Web browsing. "We can figure out where the next most useful information is. In a restaurant, maybe it's a menu. Or maybe it's a social menu. It's about explicit and implicit location," she said.

The search is being done by taking users location as a piece of context for finding what they want without them actually searching for anything.

Mayer's explanations should be read alone with Google CEO Eric Schmidt's remarks at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in San Francisco in September where he said at some point in the future, Google's search technology will be autonomous. He had anticipated about the technology being able to offer users search results even before they've looked for them.