That's right- Larry wanted a question-answering machine. Larry and Sergey "got bored of search" (I heard this from the engs who were going to weekly presentations to show new search features) when they felt it was just chasing a larger index and showing people what they wanted to click on.

That would certainly be an improvement over their current strat (ignoring what I want to click on, showing me what's most profitable for them instead)

Meanwhile I long for the days where this was Google's focus. I want a better index of the web and I want the search engine to give me the tools to filter out the garbage I don't want. The fact that this isn't a feature tells you everything you need to know about Google's real priority: it's not us, it's the advertisers.

> I want the search engine to give me the tools to filter out the garbage I don't want.

Thought some people might want that.

Have the user interface and pure/applied math worked out and documented and code designed, written, and running.