There’s an interesting post on TechCrunch based on a comment by Google’s Marissa Mayer, who apparently said that search is “90-95% solved.”

Regardless of the context in which this comment was made, the post’s response is that the problem is not solved: it then outlines a number of areas where information retrieval has yet to succeed. However, (reminiscent of a short question that appeared in the panels of RecSys 2007) there are other questions to ask: when is ANY research question “solved?” What does it mean for a problem (like information retrieval or collaborative filtering) to be “solved?”

Thoughts?