[kemiller]

It interrupts their (extremely powerful) brand, though. Right now, the word "google" literally means search to millions of people. If that switches to "let me siri that for you" it opens the door for entrants who today don't even have a chance. If siri can intelligently choose among multiple specialized search services, even more so.

[webjprgm]

Google really does need a way for figuring out the context of my question, so that it can do the specialization part. If they had a better social presence, then they could recognize my interests and habits as part of that context. So knowing I'm a programmer, when I type in "node" they could assume Node.js.

Some context from the question: If they can tell I'm talking about restaurants they can show me just restaurants. If I type in the name of a park, I don't want real estate and insurance companies with coincidentally the same name. Maybe asking a question in a full sentence like you do with Siri gives better context clues? Or maybe Siri just likes to assume a small set of tasks (calendar, looking for a business, making a task) and so is good at guessing those contexts but would be bad at other things. I can't really say much about Siri because I have an iPhone 4 and not a 4S. Oh well.

Google does do a bit of context guessing, like using Geo IP to guess my location, so a business or restaurant name comes up with local businesses.