The Future Of Search(sort of)

Danny SullivanEditor-In-Chief

Search Engine Landhttp://searchengineland.com

The Future? It’s Now!

Hard to predict since two key things I expected to happen HAVE happened

Personalized results… Blended results

Internet Librarian, November 2001…

Read My Mind (Nov. 2001)

Sept. 11 dramatically illustrates the main search challenge – the need to somehow automatically hit the correct dataset Images for search on “pictures of spain” MP3 files for search on “madonna” Movie info for search on Harry Potter

this month

Invisible Tabs (Dec. 2003)

Answer to everything is not a web page

Search engines will begin to hit specialty databases in the right occasion, pushing the right tab behind the scenes Pictures, Buying, News Headlines

Federated Search Hits The Web

Or is it? Meta search Universal Search 3D / Morph Answers Shortcuts

“Blended results” or “Blended search” more generic and clearer…

Google Universal Search: May 07

Automatically queries: Books, images, news, video, local + web

More sources added in the future

Relevancy of each vertical “silo” assessed and measured against others, Google says

Morehttp://searchengineland.com/070516-143312.php

Let’s see…

Ask 3D & “Morph:” June 07

3 “pane” design

3rd pane uses “Morph” algorithm to select relevant verticals Blogs, news, news images, video,

Wikipedia, dictionary, more…

More http://searchengineland.com/070604-211402.php

Let’s see…

Microsoft Live: Sept. 07

Pushing Microsoft Answers

Health, Shopping, Entertainment/Celebrities, Local

Smart Motion Video Previews More

http://searchengineland.com/070927-034138.php

Let’s see…

Yahoo: Oct. 07

Pushing Yahoo Shortcuts Events, music, movies, travel, sports,

health, shopping, businesses, and restaurants

More http://searchengineland.com/071002-012729.php

Let’s see…

Blended Overview

Verticals becoming more prominent Metaphor / presentation still being

worked out

Ask 3D didn’t generate boost; toolbar download did, and now iWon ramp-up

Live saw gains through “Search Club” More on both:

http://searchengineland.com/071001-111050.php

Still, exciting time!

Will Crawlers Survive? (Nov. 2002)

Link analysis saved them from drowning in spam

Now link manipulation has become issue Bloggers: Let’s “googlebomb” to help sites we

like

Site owners: Let’s create artificial link networks

Site owners: Let’s just get links Google “likes”

SearchKing (and others): We got good links for sale!

What’s The Solution (Nov. 2002)

They’ll come up with new link analysis abilities I still believe personalization of results

will come Specialty search may finally now recovered

from the dotcom crash… OriginSearch.com charging per day Scirus.com still going strong

Crawlers may take new lead; Google revamped news search and shopping search expected And help others with targeted paid listings

Personalized & Social Search

Focus on a particular topic, such as news

Reshaping results based on… What you personally do or visit What others you know do or visit What people in aggregate do or visit

Google Personalized Search

Results are reordered based on what’s deemed to be your personal preferences. Pages move up, down, in or out of top 10

Personalization Influencers

Google Personalized Home Page content

Google Bookmarks

Search History (Clicks)

Web History (Visits)…

Search & Web History

Social Search

Eurekster experimented with friend clicks reshaping results in 2004

Yahoo My Web promised to let us tag and use a network to reshape results…

Yahoo My Web

Yahoo My Web

My Web & Old Search Features

Social Search Reality

Neither really has succeeded The Promise & Reality Of Mixing The

Social Graph With Search Engines http://searchengineland.com/070827-121805.php

Eurekster says “swickis” much better Yahoo dropped many features quietly

But what about Facebook?

Facebook & Search

Social graph (ugh) / social network data is potentially useful Watch what others are searching on

Monitor clicks in a more “trusted” environment

Reshape results based on what you friends seem to like

But who are your friends…

Future Facebook?

http://www.dumpfolder.net/?p=193

Facebook & Search

Do you have to filter to “true” friends?

Do you then still need to consider what you’ll share?

Does Facebook instead work on aggregate level?

And what’s the underlying platform? They’ll likely remain dependent on someone else…

Facebook & Search

Go vertical? People search? Plenty in the space

http://searchengineland.com/lands/people-search.php

Or events search Upcoming rival

Others?

Or discovery…

Search Versus Discovery

Search is an on-demand, have particular need to fulfill activity

Discovery is related but less specific in what you want StumbleUpon, Digg

iGoogle related magic tabs

What Else?

Natural Language Search! Sigh

Powerset not out

Hakia.com’s clustering interesting

What Else?

Human refinement! Mahalo.com sometimes feels cluttered

but nice to see the attempt Search Wikia remains to be seen

http://searchengineland.com/061229-193718.php

Overall

Verticals to continue growing Personalized should survive privacy

issues and be helpful Perhaps social will indeed play role Lots of room to grow

Report: 7 Out Of 10 Americans Experience 'Search Engine Fatigue’

Overall

72% experience “search engine fatigue” (either “always,” “usually,” or “sometimes”) when researching

65% percent say they’ve spent two or more hours in a single sitting searching

1000 adults by Kelton Reseach for Autobytel http://searchengineland.com/071023-093541.php

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