The ongoing evolution of search
The ongoing evolution of search
The growth of search complexity
Search has been evolving rapidly over the past decade.
Some interesting pointers that will tell part of the story:
Some interesting pointers that will tell part of the story:
- Google search volume has grown 1,000 times since 1999.
- Google has more than 1,000 times the machines it had in 1999.
- Latency dropped from less than 1,000 ms to less than 200 ms.
- Index update latency improved by about 10,000 times.
The 'Google' phenomenon
The key to the phenomenal success of Google lies in its willingness and desire to get the search users going to their destination as quickly as possible. Its advertising platform, probably the world's largest, is complemented by the lucrative Ads, AdSense, and the embeddable Google Search base. It has been found again and again that the brand preference for Google outweighs the logical consideration of the search results quality. Competing search engines who plan to take market share from Google are going to have to think differently. Google has already gone beyond its mission statement. Google and NASA are working on new networking protocols that can work with the long latency times and low bandwidth in space. Google is also pursuing alternative energy initiatives and has also ventures in office productivity software with Google Docs. Also future prospects involve Google becoming a more general-purpose pattern-matching and searching engine.
In future, engines will make crawling improvements
Search engines are already breaking down some of the traditional limitations on crawling. There is the possibility that search engines could begin to execute JavaScript to find the content which may be embedded within it. Another major historical limitation of search engines is dealing with forms. Search engines might perform form submissions and gain access to currently inaccessible content.
Engines are getting new content sources
As part of its efforts to move more data to the Web, in 2004 Google launched an initiative to scan books so that they could be incorporated into a Book Search search engine. In addition to books, other historical documents are worth scanning. Google is not the only organization pursuing such missions.
Likewise, content owners also retain lots of other proprietary information that is not generally available to the public. Some of this information is locked up behind log-ins for subscription-based content. To provide some incentive to such content owners to make these content available, Google came up with its First Click Free concept, which is a program to allow Google to crawl subscription-based content.
Also, there is a lot of other content out there which is not on the Web at all, and this is information that the search engines want to index. To access it, they can approach the content owners and work on proprietary content deals.
Likewise, content owners also retain lots of other proprietary information that is not generally available to the public. Some of this information is locked up behind log-ins for subscription-based content. To provide some incentive to such content owners to make these content available, Google came up with its First Click Free concept, which is a program to allow Google to crawl subscription-based content.
Also, there is a lot of other content out there which is not on the Web at all, and this is information that the search engines want to index. To access it, they can approach the content owners and work on proprietary content deals.
Multimedia is becoming indexable
Content in images, audio, and video is currently not indexable by the search engines, but all the major engines are working on solutions to this problem. In the case of images, optical character recognition (OCR) technology has been around for decades. The main problem in applying it to search engines has been that it is a computing-intensive process. But as computing technology gets cheaper, it becomes easier to resolve.
Creative solutions are being worked out as in the case of Google Image Labeler where users agree to record labels for what is in an image. The whole exercise is being carried out in the guise of a game. Participants work in pairs, and every time they get matching labels they score points, with more points being awarded for more detailed labels.
There are sites like Recaptcha.net who help to complete the digitization of books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times. These have been made possible by means of scanning and OCR software. There are problems when using OCR technology as there are instances where the software cannot determine a word with 100% confidence. Human intelligence is also assisting to figure out these words and feeding them back into the database of digitized documents.
Other technologies like speech-to-data solutions can be used in audio and video files to extract more data from them.
The demand for information which is difficult to be indexed is increasing so fast that the search engines are finding it difficult to keep pace. Search engines have to show these data in an accurate and relevant form among their results.
The demand for alternative type of content as shown by the emergence of You Tube as the No. 2 search engine is also significant. The demand for alternative forms of content is quite high. Thus search engines should work on improved techniques for indexing alternative content.
Sophisticated interactive technologies like Flash and AJAX are also fast gaining because of the need of interactive content by internet users with broadband connectivity. The definition of "interactive" content is changing continuously from two- to three-dimensional and becoming more of a full immersion experience.
Creative solutions are being worked out as in the case of Google Image Labeler where users agree to record labels for what is in an image. The whole exercise is being carried out in the guise of a game. Participants work in pairs, and every time they get matching labels they score points, with more points being awarded for more detailed labels.
There are sites like Recaptcha.net who help to complete the digitization of books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times. These have been made possible by means of scanning and OCR software. There are problems when using OCR technology as there are instances where the software cannot determine a word with 100% confidence. Human intelligence is also assisting to figure out these words and feeding them back into the database of digitized documents.
Other technologies like speech-to-data solutions can be used in audio and video files to extract more data from them.
The demand for information which is difficult to be indexed is increasing so fast that the search engines are finding it difficult to keep pace. Search engines have to show these data in an accurate and relevant form among their results.
The demand for alternative type of content as shown by the emergence of You Tube as the No. 2 search engine is also significant. The demand for alternative forms of content is quite high. Thus search engines should work on improved techniques for indexing alternative content.
Sophisticated interactive technologies like Flash and AJAX are also fast gaining because of the need of interactive content by internet users with broadband connectivity. The definition of "interactive" content is changing continuously from two- to three-dimensional and becoming more of a full immersion experience.
More personalized and user-influenced searches
The search engines are trying to make their searches more personalized. Usually the search engines do a reverse IP lookup to find out where the searcher is located and then adjust the results based on the location of the searcher. Search engines like Google have invested heavily in personalization of search results for greater user satisfaction.
User Intent
The success of Internet search has always relied on and will continue to rely on the search engine's abilities to identify searcher's intent. This is illustrated amply by Microsoft's latest entrant into the search engine arena, Bing.com. It has been positioned as a "decision" engine based on the analysis and research of search sessions. It was found that two-thirds of searchers frequently use search to make decisions. Microsoft also found that decision making was proving to be difficult based on the average length of the search session. The searchers may be in different modes at different points in time and each of these modes may dictate very different results for the same search.
Google's personalization and Universal Search are trying to tap into that intent as well, based on previous search history as well as by serving up a mix of content types, including maps, blog posts, videos, and text results. It's not just about presenting the results but also about presenting them in the format that matches the searcher's intent.
The now -defunct Yahoo! Labs project Yahoo! Mindset simply had a searcher-operated slider bar with "research" on one end and "buy" on the other. Sliding it reshuffled the results in real time via AJAX.
Google's personalization and Universal Search are trying to tap into that intent as well, based on previous search history as well as by serving up a mix of content types, including maps, blog posts, videos, and text results. It's not just about presenting the results but also about presenting them in the format that matches the searcher's intent.
The now -defunct Yahoo! Labs project Yahoo! Mindset simply had a searcher-operated slider bar with "research" on one end and "buy" on the other. Sliding it reshuffled the results in real time via AJAX.
User interactions
There is a lot of scope for development in how users interact with the search engines. With the advance of technology, as RSS adoption continues to grow and the sheer amount of information in its many formats expands, users will continue to look to search engines to be not just a search destination, but also a source of information aggregation; the search engine as portal, pulling and updating news and other content based on user preferences.
New search patterns
The focus has shifted away from rankings, keywords, and optimization, things that have been until now synoymous with SEO, to a much greater focus on users, tying into their intent and interests at the time of search. Personalization will make site stickiness ever more important. Securing a position in the user's history, becoming an authoritative go-to source for information, will be more critical than ever. Winning in the SERPs will require much more than just position.
The attenion of a potential customer is a scarce and limited quantity. As the quantity of information available to us grows, the amount of time we have available for each piece of information declines, creating an attention deficit. How people search, and how advertisers interact with them, may change dramatically as a result.
These changes will make the SEO of tomorrow remain responsible for publishers to gain access to potential customers through a vast array of new mechanisms that currently do not exist.
(Courtesy the book The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, et al)
The attenion of a potential customer is a scarce and limited quantity. As the quantity of information available to us grows, the amount of time we have available for each piece of information declines, creating an attention deficit. How people search, and how advertisers interact with them, may change dramatically as a result.
These changes will make the SEO of tomorrow remain responsible for publishers to gain access to potential customers through a vast array of new mechanisms that currently do not exist.
(Courtesy the book The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, et al)
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