Another Future of Search Prognostication
August 22, 2010
I am having a tough time keeping track of the “future of search” prognostications. For years, no one seemed to think much about search. In fact, until I pointed out in 2003 or so that search sucked, did not work, generally annoyed most of those using the systems, and was becoming a commodity—people were indifferent. Google worked. End of story. Commercial search systems were used by one or two percent of online users and the other 98 percent had zero knowledge of industrial-strength information retrieval.
Today, everyone’s an expert.
Navigate to “The Future of Internet Search” by Zurich-born Esther Dyson. Her interests range from investing to health care, private aviation, and space travel. I am happy to catch a flight to Detroit that sort of works. Space travel is a bit of a reach for the goose.
The write up presents a view of the future of search. For me, the main idea is that search has bumbled along. There’s an obligatory nod to Yahoo and some highlights for Google and Bing. The key passage, in my opinion, is:
Medstory has a deep understanding of health care, including the relationships between diseases and treatments, drugs and symptoms, and side effects. Powerset, a tool for creating and defining such relationships in any sphere of interest, is broader but less deep. This all happened a couple of years ago – just before Yahoo! gave up on search entirely and handed that part of its business over to Microsoft. Also around that time, Bill Gates uttered one of the smartest things he has ever said: “The future of search is verbs.” But he said it at a private dinner and it never spread.
Three observations:
- Okay, search is verbs. Are these the nifty “own,” “buy”, “invest,” “crush” and “kill” variety or the fuzzier “seem” “may”, “could-would-should” species. And what does “is” mean? I am still trying to figure that out.
- The semantic understanding “thing” in information retrieval is gaining momentum. Software, by golly, is going to figure out what a user really means and what he really wants.
- The methods for figuring out intent are moving from the specialist conferences to the pow wows among investors and other movers and shakers. I think this is okay, but I am not sure that this type of “push” is going to have the payout that some anticipate.
- The write up underscores that key word search is “yesterday”. Got it.
So the future of search is not the search that I use when conducting my research. No problem. I prefer to formulate queries, filter results, process information, and produce what I think are my value adds the old fashioned way. I don’t need nor do I want training wheels, black boxes, or a kindergarten teacher approach, thank you.
Stephen E Arnold, August 22, 2010
Freebie. Predict that.
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