IMAGINE a world where you were given answers to questions you didn't know you had. That's the future of search, according to the chief executive of Twitter - the site every tech company wants a piece of, with Microsoft and Google recently announcingsearch deals with Twitter that will result in people's tweets being added to their respective search engine's results.

''We are in the middle of a series of experiments to try to figure out how to enable people to discover what they need to know without asking,'' Evan Williams told me at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. ''Our whole goal is about telling people what is happening in the world and doing it really well. We want to be able to find out what information you want before you do.''

It sounds sublime and slightly frightening at the same time. But how will the 85-strong Twitter team achieve what is essentially the nirvana of search? Williams becomes quite vague and secretive at this point.

''Location is an obvious one - we can tell quite easily where you are and what information you could be interested in from that. But with our new lists feature [which allows people to create groups of those they follow] and as we get better at curating and filtering the information we have, we will be able to serve people increasingly personalised real-time content. That's valuable and will make people continue to use and rely upon Twitter.''

Williams has no interest in selling Twitter because there is so much more he feels the team can do with it: ''We know we need to get much better at helping people get started and well connected when they sign up to Twitter. People aren't sure how to discover content on the site, or even how to use it. There is this preconceived notion that it is necessary for everyone to create content, when actually you can just use Twitter to consume.''

Mobile is another priority area because of the mammoth gains in reach and revenue Williams believes it will bring. Having just rolled out Twitter mobile across India and Japan, talks are now taking place with phone makers so the service can be integrated into as many handsets as possible.

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