"what year was movie X released" is an easy query to answer. It doesn't require much context, it doesn't need any information about the user, and movie release

"what year was movie X released" is an easy query to answer. It doesn't require much context, it doesn't need any information about the user, and movie release dates are widely available in many public sources. But there's no reason that search engines should be limited to trivial searches of public data. A modern search engine needs to be able to handle situations like: * User has a reservation at a local restaurant, so they ask [where's lunch] and want to receive the time and location of their reservation. And they want driving directions, unless they don't own a car, in which case they want directions from the nearest public transport. * User just got back from Hawaii and wants to show their coworkers a photo they took of a cool wave. So they search for [wave picture] and want the picture they took to be in their search results. * User is writing a PhD thesis on tree rings and found a useful article last month, but now they want to cite it and can't remember what it was called. So they search for [article about tree rings] and want that particular article to be the first result. In other words, the 2001 model of a search engine as "grep for the web" is far behind what people expect in 2013.