Yahoo apparently feels the same. It says it wants to move Web search away from the "web of pages" that exists today and toward a "web of objects." Objects are anything that exists in the world -- people, places and things -- and they can all be mapped together to present search results in more useful ways, according to Raghavan.

"The real world we live and work in is full of objects -- politicians, professors, monuments, restaurants, neighborhoods. Each has certain attributes, like what kind of food it serves or where it is located," he said.

The goal is to organize results in a way that reflects how those objects relate to each other in real life. Searching for "Paris," for example, should reveal related "objects" such as travel guides, cheap airplane tickets, and images of the city -- in short, all the related content users might want to see.

"We're going to stop worrying about how many billions of pages can be indexed," Raghavan said. "It's about building and creating the most comprehensive web of objects."

Part of the challenge is figuring out the user's intent. "You cater to the user's intent as best you can define it," he said. For example, there are many towns in the world called Syracuse, but if a person is searching for "Syracuse restaurant" and it's 6 p.m. Eastern Time, there's a good chance they are in New York because that's where it's time for dinner.