[Sven7]

Google's problem in search has never been a lack of good engineering, its been a lack of vision for search. The fact that someone from the search team isn't leading the company says everything.

I think the IBM's Watson, Wolfram Alpha, Freebase etc were more much visionary than what Google has done in search in the last 10 years. Even Bing's API's are much more useful. The WolframAlpha and Watson kind of NLP queries have been around for almost 6-7 years now. And Google still can't handle most of them. Whats the use of having all the AI experts on the planet?

Search should be its own company split apart from Chrome and Android. The empire defense game distracts from what Search can be,

[eitally]

I think this gets back to the aforementioned point about Marissa's statement re: serving the 98%. Yes, WA & Watson are super useful, but they're useful in ways a huge majority of the population will never miss and thus never know about. Google has been far more focused on addressing the "obvious" problems and low hanging fruit ... it's only a matter of time before they start encroaching, imho.