Search Improvements 2008 - THAT'S IT?

A few days ago, Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO of Enquiro , moderated a Webinar with the Search 2010 Panel; the panel is a who's who list of stellar participants in the Search space, including representatives from all the major search engines. You can find the actual Webinar and read Gord's post about it here: Search 2010 - A Review.

Gord writes:

I won’t steal the panelists thunder, but the first question I posed to them was what they see as the biggest change to search in the coming year. Most pointed to the continued emergence of blended search results on the page, as well as more advances in disambiguating intent. A few panelists looked at the promise of mobile, driven by advances in mobile technology such as multi touch displays, embodied in the iPhone.

He adds:

[One area]  ... is how search functionality will start showing up in more and more places. Already, we’re seeing search being a key component in many mash ups. The ability to put this functionality under the hood and have it power more and more functional interfaces, combined with other 2.0 and 3.0 capabilities, will drive the web forward.

Charles Knight of AltSearchEngines, in his reaction to the Webinar [ Thomas Jefferson Dines Alone ], writes:

So what did they see as the biggest change coming to Search in 2008?
...

Let’s break it down: 1) the continued emergence of blended search results 2) more advances in disambiguating intent, and 3) the promise of mobile…such as…the iPhone.

That’s it?  That’s what the key major search engine insiders and industry analysts predict for the roller coaster year ahead?  More of the same - and the iPhone?

Now, (disclosure) I'm an occasional contributor to ASE and Charles is a personal friend of mine, so I grant that I'm biased; but I'm with Charles on this one. That's it? Those are the key changes to search predicted by the major search engines for the next year? Is it just me, or do all of these changes seem - evolutionary, not revolutionary?

In a recent article on Future Directions in Search, I highlighted the major areas for potential advances in search: Query specification, Base Index, Relevance Algorithm, Results Visualization and Ongoing Interest (Notification). In that article, I was looking at a much longer time horizon, but I expect that some discontinuous changes will occur in one or more of those areas within the next year.

Search is a highly dynamic field that presently generates a tremendous amount of interest among scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs. (Google's stratospheric market cap has ensured that!). There are so many search startups coming up, many of which are introducing new concepts and technological innovation, such as - Vertical Search: indeed, Spock, and many, many others; semantic search: hakia, powerset; dynamic results visualization: quintura; ways to add value: trulia, zillow; ways to speed up search: vortexDNA; and so on. At least through acquisition, if nothing else, the mainstream search engines should be able to move ahead quickly.

As a specific example, let's look at the Video search space. I recently discovered Mark Robertson's web site, ReelSEO, which is dedicated to SEO/SEM of video content. On his site, Mark hosts the Comprehensive list of video search engines and video sharing sites, which lists over 100+ sites dedicated to video sharing and search. With so many players, surely there's someone who will introduce a new concept or significant change in video search?

Finally, let us acknowledge the elephant in the room. What about - discontinuous improvements to the heart of the Search Engine, the PageRank algorithm? After all, reduced to essentials, PageRank is only an approximation of the authority of a web page or site, based on the value and authority of incoming links. It was certainly an amazing insight on the part of Google's founders, and worthy of the success it attained; but just because all the major search engines use it today does not make it the right way or the only way to identify relevant results.

Perhaps there are other approximations which may work as well or better? Examples of alternative algorithms include: swarm intelligence (like Ant Colony Optimization), human algorithms (e.g. people-powered engines for popular searches and breaking news), brand authority (hey, we use it for everything else in life!), social graph, and many others.

Regardless of what Gord's A-list panel says, there's one thing I'm sure of: 2008 will be an exciting year for Search!

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Comments

[Miriam]

Searching images, audio, and video; not just their tags or metadata; will be an exciting addition to search. Image and voice recognition are improving but I doubt they will be mature in 2008. Language translation tools seem to be improving also which could broaden some searches.

[NitinK]

Excellent points, Miriam - thank you for your comment! You're right, rich media search (images, video and audio) and language translation are likely to be important areas for advances in search in 2008.

In her keynote address at the Searchnomics conference this year, Marissa Mayer of Google included all of these as areas that Google is focusing on:
Searchnomics 2007 Keynote