If there was one category/subject/thing you could have Google give instant answers on, what would it be?<p>Your answers will help me out a lot, and the more the better. Thanks!
Time. It's surprisingly difficult to order search results temporally, and according to Googlers on the search team with whom I've discussed this, a major part of the problem is the divergence between creation time, recorded creation time, and Google's discovery time. This would be particularly valuable for news, where Google has fallen behind an inexplicably fails to leverage its machine learning advantage to extract semantically rich information rather than doing relatively dumb string matching.<p>Yeah, that's sort of abstract. I like the hard problems :-) On a more conventional note, and in descending order of difficulty:<p>- search for musical data by musical sequence, eg searching for 'G-G-G-E' would suggest Beethoven's 5th symphony, but searching for 'C-C-C-A' would also suggest it as a transposed result. This isn't as difficult as it sounds, as there are MIDI files for most classical and historically popular pieces, MIDI and/or ringtones for popular contemporary ones, and polyphonic pitch extraction is a relatively well understood signal processing task. Easy win for someone with the interest and infrastructure: using the audio recording features in HTML 5 for tune identification, as already present in some mobile apps for both content discovery and contextual identification.<p>- Software error codes and the like. I find troubleshooting a miserable experience, especially when so many results turn out to be community-based forum support which fails to resolve problems.<p>- Hurf durf semantic web grumble grumble.
My wife and I just moved into a new house, and on more than one occasion we've foolishly tried to Google the following:<p>"restaurants open right now" or "restaurants that deliver here"<p>As a software engineer, I know these queries won't work, but I keep hoping that one day Google will surprise me. It should be hard to parse "right now" to be the current local time, and limit the search to my current location. The same is true of the other query. Google has local restaurants along with attributes like "delivery" so it should be possible.