April 2010, Matt Cutts who was working at Google on search, was asked how does he see search working in a decade from now. It is always fun to look at predictions from the past and see how they came out. And making a prediction on how search will change over a ten-year period, espesially back then, was pretty bold.

The video was just 1 minute and 18 seconds long but he said a few things:

(1) (CORRECT) He isn’t sure if we will see “brain add-ons” in search. He was right, I mean, we had Google Glass, but nothing is implanted in our brains today.

(2) (CORRECT) We will have devices with us all the time, like cell phones, but more capable, he said.

(3) (CORRECT) More of your information will be in the cloud. Yep.

(4) (Partially CORRECT) Personalization in search will be more important. Search engines will know more about what you like and dislike and relevancy will be based on that. He said location or previous things you clicked on would influence search. Well, location is important but outside of location, what you click on in search is not really being used. Personalization was thought to be a big deal in the future, but it really did not happen as expected.

Here is the video:

Here is the transcript:

Here is John Mueller’s tweet that brought this up today:

Forum discussion at Twitter.