Within five to eight years, search engines will start to appear much more human-like, according to Google engineering chief Ray Kurzweil. They will respond to long and complex questions, understand the meaning of the documents they are searching, and be on the look-out for information they think might be useful to people. These advances will lead to improved problem-solving, not just for punctual questions, but for longer-term projects, he said.

Lindsay Rosenberg / Lindsay Rosenberg Photography Google Inc. engineering chief Ray Kurzweil spoke with Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker, left, at the Wall Street Journal CIO Network conference in San Diego.

The Google search engine of today ranks pages according to the number of times they have been cited by other pages. “Larry and Sergey applied page rank to Web pages. If a lot of other pages point to it, then it must be an important page. And that’s worked very well,” Mr. Kurzweil said Monday evening at the Wall Street Journal CIO Network conference in San Diego, where he was interviewed on stage by Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker. Mr. Kurzeil is developing a new kind of search. “Google has already taken steps toward actually understanding the meaning and it can read with a little bit of understanding. That’s basically what I’m working on, to actually understand the content of the Web pages.”

That new search will create new capabilities. “You can ask it more complex questions that might be a whole paragraph … It might engage in a dialogue with you to find out what you need,” he said.

Mr. Kurzweil said that new capabilities will arise from the technology. “You might be able to assign the search engine research projects. If it doesn’t know the answer to a question right away, it might come back in two months if it finds something useful. That is the future of search,” he said during an interview with CIO Journal.

Mr. Kurzweil told CIO Journal that these evolutions in search technology will be apparent to users in five to eight years, and that search will have human-like capability by 2029.

It’s all part of a rapidly evolving integration of human and artificial intelligence, which the author, scientist and inventor refers to as the Singularity. “We’re going to expand who we are. We’re going to become more non-biological,” Mr. Kurzweil said. The biological capabilities of the human mind are improving at a linear rate, while the non-biological capabilities of technology are increasing at an exponential rate. He predicts that by 2029, artificial intelligence will have human-like capabilities, which he refers to as the Singularity. Mr. Kurzweil says he doesn’t believe this will lead to a dystopian future, because those capabilities will be widely distributed among a wide variety of actors, rather than a small group of “evil corporations.”

Technology, Mr. Kurzweil conceded, always has been a double-edged sword. “Fire kept us warm ... and fire burned down our villages,” he said.

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Rachael King contributed to this story.