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Search: 2010 - A Review

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Search 2010 - A Review

Yesterday, I had the tremendous privilege of moderating a Webinar with our Search 2010 Panel: Marissa Mayer from Google, Larry Cornett from Yahoo, Justin Osmer from Microsoft, Daniel Read from Ask, Jakob Nielsen from the Nielsen Norman Group, Chris Sherman from Search Engine Land and Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence.

It was a great conversation, and the full one hour Webinar is ' /></a> <strong><em>More Useful Results</em></strong></p> <p>The second of the 4 major areas goes to the nature of the results themselves, and what is returned to us with our query. Universal (Federated, Blended, etc) results are the first step in this direction. Expect to see more of this. Daniel Read from Ask led the charge in this direction, with their much lauded 3D interface. As engines crawl more sources of information, including videos, audio, news stories, books and local directories, they can match more of this information to user’s interpreted intent. This will drive the biggest visible changes in search over the short term. For the head phrases, those high volume, less ambiguous queries, engines will become increasing confident in providing us a richer, more functional result set. This will mean media results for entertainment queries, maps and directory information for local queries and news results for topics of interest.</p> <p>But Marissa Mayer feels we’re still a long ways from maximizing the potential of the plain old traditional web results. She pointed out some examples of results where Google’s teams had been working on pulling more relevant and informative snippets, and showing fresher results for time sensitive topics. Jakob Nielsen chimed in by saying that none of the examples shown during the Webinar were particularly useful. And here comes the crux of a search engine’s job. Just using relevance as the sole criteria isn’t good enough. For someone looking for when the iPhone might be available in Canada, there are a number of pages that could be equally relevant, based on content alone, but some of those pages could be far more useful than others. The concept of usefulness as a ranking factor hasn’t really been explored by any of the algorithms, and it’s a far more subtle and nuanced factor than pure relevance. It depends on gathering the interactions of users with the pages themselves. And, in this case, we’re again reliant on the popularity of a page. It will be much easier to gather data and accurately determine “usefulness” for popular queries than it will be for long tail queries.</p> <p>By the way, the concept of usefulness extends to advertising as well. A good portion of the Webinar was devoted to how advertising might remain in sync with organic results, whatever their form. Increasingly, as long as usefulness is the criteria, I see the line blurring between what is editorial content and what is advertising on the page. If it gets a user closer to their intent, then it’s served its purpose.</p> <strong><em>Mobile</em></strong></p> <p>When we’re talking innovation, the panel seems to see only incremental innovation in the near term on the desktop. But as a few panelists pointed out in the interview, mobile is in the midst of disruptive innovation right now. The iPhone marked a significant upping of the bar, with its multitouch capabilities and smoother user experience. What the iPhone did in the mobile world is move the user experience up to a whole new level. With that, there’s suddenly a competitive storm brewing to meet and exceed the iPhone’s capabilities. As the hardware and operating systems queue up for a series of dramatic improvements, it can only bode well for the mobile online experience, including search.</p> <p>Remember, there’s a pent up flood of functionality just waiting in the mobile space for the hardware to handle it. The triad of bottlenecks that have restricted mobile innovation – speed of connectivity, processing power and limitations of the user interface – all appear that they could break loose at the same time. When those give way, all the players are ready to significantly up the ante in what the mobile search experience could look like.</p> <strong><em>Mash Ups</em></strong></p> <p>One area that we were only able to touch on tangentially (an hour was far too short a time with this group!) 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.</p> <p>But it’s not only on the desktop that we’ll see search go undercover. We’ve already touched on mobile, but also expect to see search functionality built into smarter appliances (a fridge that scans for recipes and specials at the grocery store) and entertainment centers (on the fly searching for a video or audio file). Microsoft’s surface computing technology will bring smart interfaces to every corner of our home, and connectivity and searchability goes hand in hand with these interfaces between our physical and virtual worlds.</p> <p>That touches on just some of the topics we covered in our one hour with the panelists. You can access the full Webinar at http://www.enquiroresearch.com/future-of-search-2010.aspx. We’ll be following up in 2008 with more topics, so stay tuned!<br /> <br /> <a href=Comments

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