The CEO of Google Eric Schmidt has gone on air saying today the search engines are at a primitive stage of evolution. This is not with standing the grandiose announcement made by Bing that it wants to be termed a decision engine. For all its announcements of its intentions Bing is no different from Google except that it is slightly different and some may even say it is a shade better in certain aspects. He then went on to say that developments in Artificial Intelligence will help in refining the search engines. He has also gone on to add that search engines are about understanding one another granting all the barriers of language, culture upbringing etc., 
Before search engines can implement the developments in AI as and when they come, we have to understand that we use language to communicate with each other say English. A sentence is nothing but a collection of words that follow a grammatically correct pattern and a word is again a collection of letters that probably makes no sense to a computer except the number of bytes and ASCII code.
What exactly does a word represent? A word can be a noun or verb or adjective. Which means it can be an object or action or description. 
In other words a word that we use is a code for the numerous experiences of a human being. To understand a word the computer has to understand the code or to what the code is referring to.
A human being is conditioned from his childhood to learn words or remember the codes, what they represent and then he learns to recall the code when he wants to use. But how does he remember the code for an object? By comparison. Just as the computer can compare numbers, human beings are conditioned and taught right from their child hood to compare and recognize objects in 2 and 3 dimensions by using their senses and they give a code to it which is a noun. Then what is a verb? It is the action of these nouns. That is several frames in time, of an object. Adjectives or slightly trickier because many can be subjective rather than be objective and for description of the same topic, can differ from person to person depending on the way a human being is conditioned.
For a search engine to become sophisticated it has to first learn or at least understand the codes of the words and it also has to understand the contents of a file to be able to take a decision. Considering the speed and memory of present day computers I guess we will have to wait for that to happen.
Microsoft has unveiled its intentions if not the product, what it calls the new decision engine, Bing. It justifies the product design by quoting statistics. One does not know the validity of those but going by the justification one shall soon be relying on the decisions on just about every thing, made by Bing. That Google has the best algorithms for rating and ranking everything on the web is well known. Whether Bing can come up with a better algorithm or even match that of Google needs to be seen and will be known over a period of time.
Now the news that is being discussed by all techies, bloggers, webmasters and net surfers all over the world is just about the new search engine that is going to be into action this june, launched by the most popular TECH company in the world, THE MICROSOFT. MICROSOFT claims that its new search engine BING is going to be the leader in the online search department.