The Future of Search (sort of) - Danny Sullivan

Keynote Speech, Wednesday, Oct. 31

First off, there evidently was an earthquake last night.  Everyone seems to have noticed it except me.  Hmmm. 

Danny Sullivan started out as a journalist.  His advice about earthquakes:  watch us Californians; if we’re not running for cover, you’re o.k.

In 2001 when Google only had 5 tabs, it was difficult for searchers to realize and remember to click the tab to focus the search.

Federated search hit the web: (no one calls it federated search).  AKA  meta search, universal search, answers, shortcuts, blended results. 

Google universal search (May 07):

Automatic queries of the entire web: ( books, images, news, video, local + web); they will be adding more in the future. Relevancy of each vertical silo is evaluated. They compare the results and decide how to group the results (3 or 5 video results? book results first?)

Sample search result image:  top three are next to a map (local results).  Images are entering into the results (e.g., video image clip next to a video result).  There is a little plus (+) symbol under the search result.  If you click on the plus, it will open the video right on the results page.  This is a huge change reflecting that people maybe aren’t so freaked out by changes to search pages.

But it gets confusing because result types from one search do not carry over to another search.  Maybe Google is still figuring out where it is going, or fine tuning it.

A lot more vertical search results (specialized search results) are coming in.  When you go to someplace like Google you are doing a horizontal search.  A vertical search is a specialized or topical search (e.g., news)

Ask 3D & Morph:  June 2007

Google’s universal upstaged them by coming out a few weeks earlier.

3 “pane” design, uses “morph” algorhythm which decides which vertical results to put in each pane.  Top of the page has news.  To the right are images and videos:  attempts to suggest vertical search results, giving what they think are best results in those categories.  But it is not working as well as it should.  Most people just look at the search results down the page, but the news and specialized results are over on the side.  It needs a little more fine tuning.

Microsoft Live:  Sept. 2007

Their main way to get more vertical stuff out is to push Microsoft Answers.

There is a new feature where if you hover over a video result you will get a 30 second preview.  They have a focused health database.  At the top of a search result page is a pane with suggested health answers.  But people tend to pass over this section like they would a banner ad.

Celebrity xrank shows up if you do a name search on a celebrity, which gives you lots of charts and stuff.  They are trying to get you into specialized search results.  Bur it feels like catchup to the other search engines.

Yahoo: Oct. 2007

Pushing Yahoo shortcuts.  Events, music movies, travel, etc.

Specialized search results appear at the top of the page.  video shorts just like Microsoft.

Going forward:

Verticals are becoming more prominent.

Metaphor/presentation is still being worked out.  Ask 3D didn’t generate a boost in searching, but the toolbar download did (allows creating an avatar as part of the toolbar), and now the iWon ramp-up.  Microsoft Live saw gains through its Search Club.

Giveaways are attracting more people than search refinements.

From the past:  will crawlers survive?

Link analysis saved SE’s from drowning in spam.  Now link manipulation has become an issue:

Googlebombing

Artificial link networks (site owners)

Dropping in links google likes (site owners)

Solution (2002):  personalization of results (still applies)

Personalized & Social Search

Reshaping results based on what you personally visit, and what others like you do and visit

Results are reordered based on what’s deemed to be your personal preferences.  Pages may move up or down.  Why it works for Google is that it’s a great ego booster:  e.g., searching your own personal blog, Google sees you are going there often, so it moves that result up to the top for your results (ego boosting)

If you use the google personalized home page and put something on the page, or bookmark something, they use those things to help rank results for your searches.  No one is matching Google in the personalized search results.  It is not getting near the attention it should.

Social search

Eurekster experimented with friend clicks reshaping results in 2004.  Yahoo My Web promised to let us tag and use a network to reshape results.  The idea was as we tagged and saved our friends/web pages, they would be able to shape our search results.  But Yahoo seems to have dropped this.  They seem to be trying to figure out what to do.  People probably don’t want to tag the web.

Social search reality

Neither really has succeeded (the promise and reality of mixing the social graph with search engine).  Eurekster says swikis are much better.  Yahoo dropped many features quietly

Facebook and search:

Social graph/social network data is potentially useful:  watch what others are searhing on; monitor clicks in a more trusted environment, and reshape results based on what works for you. 

But:… do you have to filter to true friends, do you then still need to consider what you will share, does facebook instead work on aggregate level; what is the underlying platform?  Users will likely remain dependent on someone else… (Google?)  They don’t really know how to run a search engine.

Facebook - will they apply a search engine?  go vertical?  people search? discovery? (search is an on demand thing, users have a particular need to fulfill an activity).  Discovery is related but less specific.  There is some crossover, e.g., news - I may not want news, but I stumble upon news about my search.

Google’s invisible tabs - name your tab and google will search through all the other tabs people have named the same.

What else?  Natural language search:  powerset (not out yet), hakia (it classifies topics based on other natural language searches; clustering classification.)

What else?  Human refinement.  Google results can still be manipulated (e.g., viagra search pulls up a lot of unviersity sites because spammers are able to spam open sites).  Mahalo.com is somewhat cluttered, but managed by human editors.  If you are looking for good topically oriented pages, it is a good alternative to wikipedia.

Overall:

Verticals will continue to grow

Personalized searching will also grow, but there are privacy issues.

Social aspect may contine to play a role.

There is a lot of room to grow

7 of 10 Americans experience search engine fatigue. either always usually or sometimes, when researching.

65% say they’ve spent two or more hours in a single sitting but there is another survey that says people experience search rage after 12 minutes.

(Kelton Research of 1000 adults for auobytel)

Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Land:  targets both search marketers and searchers.  has a newsletter just devoted to searching (ways to search better).

Searchcr, daily searchcast

sphinn (social site for search marketers)

technorati tags:IL2007

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