Search Engines Of The Future

Bing/Microsoft were right to target this problem, “search overload”, in their new ads but really Bing is just a weak version of Google, no better than MSN Live search was. A search for “Indianapolis Web Company” pulls up www.indyfruit.com as one of the top results. Really!

So search isn’t what it should be. 30% of all searches lead to the user trying a different search. There is a lot of room for improvement.

I see search engines of the future being more like Wolfram Alpha. Touted as a “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram creates pages dynamically around search queries. Now don’t expect to type in “Indianapolis Movie Times” and get results. Try something like “Iran” and you will see a page auto-magically generate before your eyes. There will be links to expand certain areas or to link to other sites but mostly what you see is pulled in and dynamically generated when you hit submit. It doesn’t have the depth you want in a full search engine but when it works it gives you what you need to know and presents it in a very intuitive, user friendly way.

The current search engine results page lists links to 10 websites with text previews of each one. That hasn’t really changed much in 10 years. It doesn’t pull and organize that information in a meaningful way, that’s up to you. The search engines of the future will be pulling content from all over the web (see semantic web) allowing a free flow of content. This means that we may one day access and interface with content pulled from multiple websites without visiting the websites themselves.

The concept of a “website” may start to dissolve into “webcontent” that is pushed and pulled all over the web by search engines, social media, software/webware and portals we have yet to dream up.

I have no doubt that current and future websites have to be built to allow their content to flow freely in order to capitalize on the traffic third party content agregators will bring. Measuring this traffic may prove challenging if the agregator isn’t linking back to the source.

We are already seeing this happen with services like Twitter being platform agnostic. Many active Twitter users don’t go to Twitter.com to interact with the site. They use software, either web or desktop based, to interface with the service. Twitter, much like email, is a service more than a “website”. Facebook is moving this way and others are not far behind. Look at Google Local and see how companies are getting business from their listings whether or not they even have a website. Google Local feeds Google Maps feeds mobile phones and Google Voice, etc.

In looking at the current “kings” of search- Google, Yahoo and MSN- they all seem to be doing the same old thing. Sure the algorthim may be better but the information, relevant or not, is still presented much the same. I was disappointed to see Bing play it safe and not really take a big next step more in line with what Wolfram Alpha is doing.