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The Future of Search

Sol, at the Federated Search blog, summarized this article well:

What will search look like in 5, 10, or 50 years?

“Tony Russell-Rose at the Information Interaction Blog co-authored a paper about the changing face of search. He provides the article in this blog post.

Here’s the article’s list of major changes they see already happening or happening in the future:

1. Freshness of content. Not just recent but fresh AND authoritative.

2. Context in search and personalization. Already in use by major search engines, e.g. use of information from previous searches and use of user’s location. Implicit use of what users do with search results to infer their interests.

3. Natural language processing. Especially driven by social media and user-generated content.

4. Disruptive effect of search engines beyond the big three.

5. Consolidation in the enterprise search marketplace plus new companies entering the space catalyzed in large part by the maturing of Solr as a viable alternative to commercial search engines.

6. A growing focus on the user experience. Ten blue links are no longer enough. Search needs to support “exploratory search tasks, such as comparison, aggregation, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and so on.”

7. Accessibility support beyond the blind community. “For dyslexic people there is a need to understand the searching behaviour of such users, and build personalised interfaces which react to the type of dyslexia and learn from their interaction with the user interface.” Also support for severely physically disabled people.

8. The digital divide. Getting information to people in countries with oppressive governments. Supporting the use of mobile devices for information exchange.

And, the paper’s conclusion:

Finally, when most people talk about search, they typically envisage a web page with a search box and a results list. But search is increasingly becoming a ubiquitous part of our daily lives, helping us make sense of the world around us. Search is the means by which we are able to cope with our overflowing email inboxes, to generate insights from masses of corporate data, and to discover new restaurants in an unfamiliar city armed only with a smartphone and an Internet connection. Search will be everywhere, but invisible, contextualised, and personalised.”

I would add these predictions (and hopes) for search:

1. I believe that the shift will be away from search boxes and into display. Some visual search responses are emerging as OK but I do like tiled responses that separate results by some method like – articles, OPAC, books, websites, etc. Some of this can be seen in faceted search engines like Brainware and Exalead.

2. We are seeing a definite shift away from the single facet “list”. Lists are straightjackets and imply a ranking – even when that’s false.

3. We will see more emphasis on social recommendations (such as those form your Twitter, Stumbleupon or Facebook friends) combined with regular search.

4. I hope by 2015-20 that we have a better predictive search that not only fills in what I want to search but also delivers stuff to me before I know I need it based on my behaviours – like Amazon recommendations but for questions I ask.

5. And if search algorithms and consumer search is to survive, I want to be able to avoid search engine spam, content farm crap, ads, porn, etc. at my choice. We have to reduce search engine pollution. It’ll kill the Google that lays golden eggs.

Stephen

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Posted on: January 21, 2011, 6:39 am Category: Uncategorized

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  1. What about automated reference interviews and facet visualizations to further particularlize your search? There have been some experiments like Google’s Wonder wheel, but is it possible that lists have dominated because people don’t like refining their searches?

    Also, any possibility that search engines will become more targeted? For example, will some search engines go after people who write in complete sentences while others will go after syntactically different language users like the Twitter crowd, or text messagers? Personally, I dislike searching for something only to find out that the best result that contains all my search terms is an incomprehensible Twitter feed.