The question raised by an article written by Nicholas Carr in this month's edition of the Atlantic Monthly is whether Google is making us stupid? The crux of the article is that because we spend all our time now consuming information in short snippets using search, we are losing our cognitive abilities to concentrate on longer feature stories and books. Carr even suggests that people are no longer reading books in the age of Google.

You can argue the point with Carr all day long but I would posit that Google is making us stupid for a whole different set of reasons. Basically, search as we use it today is pretty much a blunt instrument. That means that results derived from search the worldwide web using the Google search engine lack any real context. Worse yet, the Google search system is being gamed by any number of organizations trying to get their content ranked higher against key words and phrases so they can enhance their advertising revenue from articles that use terms that are the most sought after by advertisers. The end result of all of this is that searching the Web has become more frustrating and what we do fine at the top of any list of search results in increasingly useless.

A big step in the right direction for the future of search is referred to as contextual search. This is the idea that search results should be presented in a way that has some context for the user. A rudimentary example of this is as follows. If you search for Windows experts in New York, you will get a list of companies that wash windows alongside companies that are experts in the Windows operating system. It would be a lot more useful if the system understood that you do a lot of work in the computer industry so the odds are good that you're not really looking for somebody to wash windows.

Microsoft hopes to steal a march on Google by being able to essentially leapfrog Google ability to deliver contextual search. To that end, Microsoft has agreed to acquire a company called PowerSet in San Francisco that has developed a contextual search engine. Ultimately, Microsoft plans to incorporate the Powerset technology into Windows Live Search. We don't know how long that will ultimately take. But if Microsoft is able to pull off delivering contextual search before Google sees the value in delivering its own version of contextual search, then the world of search will be radically different in terms of which company dominates the Web as we know it today.

There are those that say that contextual search will never amount to much of anything because it's too difficult to scale that level of personalization on the Web. Microsoft is betting otherwise so may be now is the time to start paying more attention to the implications of contextual search.