Another Future-of-Search Write Up
June 17, 2009
One of the goslings pointed me to Web Pro News and Mike McDonald’s “What’s the Future of Search?” and the subhead “Good News Is, There Is One. Bad News Is, Robot Overlords”. I jumped right to it. I love prognostications. As a failed prognosticator, I am looking for tips and clues to make my own addled goose analyses more on target.
Mr. McDonald’s not really doing the crystal ball gazing. That task fell to Rebecca Lieb “vice president for eConsultancy”. The article summarizes Ms. Lieb’s views. I don’t know Ms. Lieb but I will go with the flow on this.
Let me jump to the part where the hunters have cornered the fox. Mr. McDonald wrote”
All of this data we are feeding the machines about ourselves is going to make the machines exponentially better at interpreting what we ‘mean’ when we type in a query. Pretty soon, who knows? They may know more about what we want than we do. Won’t that be nice? Instead of typing queries into search bars, we can just request optimal instructions. Be a big time saver… Gives the ‘Feeling Lucky’ button a whole other slant too, doesn’t it?
The wrap up for the article asserted:
Search, as Rebecca points out is becoming more and more of a 2 way street. Your clients are informing your market strategies already now more than they ever have. This influence is only going to grow. If you are thinking about your Search strategy and have another group in your organization working on your Social strategy…. you guys need to hang out more. A lot more. Go to lunch, have drinks after work, become room mates (if you are management, consider handcuffing these people together) – whatever it takes. Social and search get a little closer every day. If search is vital to your business, then social is vital to your business, you may just not know it yet… But it’s coming.
My view of this view of search is generally on a similar track. I work the dirt highways and Ms. Lieb is focused more on the smart highways of the future. My observations are:
- Search vendors are under significant pressure inside their organizations and in the real world where humans dwell. The trajectory of smart software is one thing. The behavior of users is another.
- Smart search is rampant within Google and now Bing.com if I accept the marketing hoo ha at face value. Vendors don’t have much choice in this matter. The reason is that the volume of data and the vagaries of language require different types of content processing and query analysis services. Where these innovations will lead is unclear to me.
- “Social” is little more than communications with fewer syllables. The notion of putting communications, information, and metadata in a digital plastic baggy is a really big innovation. I am not sure it is “search” or if it is “robotic”. I do know that the terminology for this innovation is closer to dataspaces, than the current jargon.
I will have to check out Ms. Lieb’s hit rate in a year or two. Some of her ideas sound good.
Stephen Arnold, June 17, 2009
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One Response to “Another Future-of-Search Write Up”
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The future of search is not search. In other words, the future of retrieval is not search.
Why would I run a search when information, products and services can be brought to me taking into account what I say and do on the Internet?
Evidently the search intention of answering questions will prevail but the “tell me what I need to know” type of will work without search.
@angelmaldonado 🙂