[milohoffman]

OOC, why do you say "as a software engineer, I know these queries won't work"? What is it about those queries that leads the engineer in you to believe they are hard (not to say that they aren't, it just seems to me that Google provides remarkable results for many objectively tougher queries).

[gusgordon]

I think I can answer this question. In order for Google to actually understand these, the people at Google must manually code for this sort of query, unlike other queries where results are automatically generated. And even then, Google doesn't really "understand" them, it just knows what to spit out when the query is a match. Google has some stuff manually coded in like this, but it's almost impossible to include everything, especially when people can say "places to eat that are open now near my house" vs. "restaurants open near here" vs. hundreds of other possibilities. That's the first layer of difficulty. More difficulty comes with finding the search user's location, determining what stores are actually restaurants (is a lunch deli a restaurant at 8pm?), etc. Then for example, determining which restaurants can deliver that are open now is another difficulty.

That said, I'd bet that Google will be able to handle these queries well in 1-3 years.