What they’re doing is making that answer more accurate: Giving you the sugar shack in Massachusetts if your phone says that you’re closer to that one, not to the sugar shack strip club a thousand miles away. That’s great. There is tons of utility to that. But that’s not what I’m talking about, when I’m talking insight. It’s just making the computer better at giving the expected answer. If I’m three miles away from the sugar shack in Massachusetts, then I already expect that the one with maple candy, not Candy, to be my answer. I gain no new insight when Google smartly uses my location to answer that query. I just get my expected answer, easier.

The bit about the knowledge graph did get a little closer to what I’m after, but even there, the knowledge graph is an attempt to label everything in the world with some sort of semantic markup, and then link together the most common relationships between those labels, correct? To me, the whole reason I’m searching is because I’m trying to find fact relationships that *aren’t* commonly known.

I may have an incomplete understanding of what Google means by it, but to me it sounds like the knowledge graph is mostly about figuring out that hot dog buns are linked to hot dogs. True. But expected. I want insightful. I want to discover that hot dog buns are related to the French-Indian war. And when I find out why, I don’t expect that the answer will come in the form of a single web page. There might be three different hops to connect these things, and if I don’t find all three, then the connection is never made. Finding only two of them isn’t just a partial result. It is a non-result.

However, I am encouraged by what it says at the very end, about the future of search being more about verbs than nouns. That resonates with me.

I haven’t commented much in the past year or two, but starting in about 2005, that was one of the common themes running throughout my discussions here in your comments section. Google DNA is not about algorithms that help the average user gain insights. Google DNA is about algorithms that give the average user easy (aka unsurprising) answers.

Think about it. Take your objective criticism of Google Zeitgeist, and think about Google Search, the flagship product itself, from that same perspective. When you type in a word, two words, three words.. what do you expect to get back, as a search engine result? Are you going to get back “insight”? Or are you going to get back expected, known, popular, unsurprising, common results?

The latter. That’s just the way Google works. You’ll get the latter.

Now, don’t get me wrong: It’s an amazing technical feat that Google has been able to automate the mass scale algorithmic process of returning the “zeitgeist” of search results. And a lot of time, this is exactly what consumers want.

But what *I* want is insight. When I am searching.. I mean really searching.. I don’t want the popular result. I don’t want the common result. I already know that result. What I am looking for is what I don’t know. I’m looking for the surprising. For the unexpected. For insight.

Frankly, I’m beginning to really tire of web search in general, because even though I’ve been ask for insightful search results for over a decade (I first started talking about it, privately, in professional circles in 1999.. when Google was still building its servers out of legos), nothing has changed. They’re still the same old boring, common search algorithms. Great if I want to look up the nearest Chipotle. But useless otherwise.

As always, enjoy reading your search blog. For another perspective, here’s a non-vetted set from our Hitwise U.S. data-set (10mm U.S.) for last week:

1. What is my IP
2. What is Gangnam Style
3. What is the fiscal cliff
4. What is gluten
5. What is the Illuminati
6. What is a thesis statement
7. What is Obamacare
8. What is love
9. What is squab
10. What is right to work.

This covers all major, secondary and tertiary search engines (58 in total). Looking through the 38,000+ “what is” queries that we have access to, the top trends appear to be news/media driven informational requests, pop culture and simple tech questions.