An excellent review of the current State of Search which we were pleased to republish on AltSearchEngines.
Daniel Riveong
· 1 month ago
Awesome, I just did a presentation on this for our agency, e-storm, last week. One thing I did add was mobile and local search, though they are more like offshoots of traditional search.
briansolis
· 1 month ago
Excellent. Thanks Daniel!
Charles Knight
· 1 month ago
We would like permission to reprint this article, with full attribution and link, on www.AltSearchEngines.com.
Charles Knight, editor
ShyamKapur
· 1 month ago
This is an excellent article useful to anyone looking to insights on how search is going to evolve. I want to bring to your attention the first and only truly semantic search engine that currently works on Twitter data, TipTop, now available in a beta version at http://FeelTipTop.com TipTop’s powerful engine understands each and every message on Twitter just like a human being would. As a result, it can discover from within the data the very best tweets organized nicely along a variety of categories and concepts learned dynamically. In fact, the entire platform learns from data as data flows through the engine. You can now see in real time the sentiment associated with anything in the world that people are talking about. Please give it a try. TipTop truly is a magic engine useful for a variety of purposes.
stefanweitz
· 1 month ago
Super post Brian. It is truly awesome to see the pace of innovation in search these days and the many facets of data that engines need to examine in order to return an answer that matches the user intent. We at Bing are looking at this carefully - when we can detect either implicit or explicit intent, how can we pivot the user experience or results to more efficiently speed the user to her destination or answer his question?
I think it's interesting to look at UGC in general - even five years ago I think many of us thought we had reached the a tipping point in the generation of UGC with things like blogs and YouTube. Now look at what we create, both implicitly and explicitly: tweets, geoloc data, photos with geoloc, comments (like this one!) with federated identities, status updates, etc etc. The sheer amount of data that engines can process and turn (hopefully) into knowledge is increasing at an insane rate.
Fun times to be in search! Thanks for the post! Stefan Weitz Director, Bing
briansolis
· 1 month ago
Stefan, thank you for stopping by...great insight and thoughts. Have you shared your views w/Twitter on how to match and adapt trending topics to relevant topics by the social graph or keywords just out of curiosity? To me, it seems that the real future of search is to have one solution that brings everything together in one, curated, and highly filtered/personalized experience.
ppmartin
· 1 month ago
Great - and much "retweeted" - post, Brian. The emergence of a "mother of all search engines" combining the various categories of online search approaches you outlined may take a while. The challenge is to some extent technical, but it is to a larger extent economical, as the "owners" of the "walled gardens" you mentioned will want to protect their share of the on line advertising pie.
briansolis
· 1 month ago
Thank you...
Very true. Although, one could argue that the search results are less monetizable than the social graph.
rexfreiberger
· 1 month ago
Great overview of the impact of social search, Brian.
briansolis
· 1 month ago
Appreciate it Rex...
Sundar Kadayam
· 1 month ago
Excellent post Brian. I think that there's one aspect of search that is not getting the attention it deserves - deeper, informational searches. Organic search results in so many categories are overrun with links that aren't really useful to people, an effect of factors like SEO and social media and probably others. Despite all the innovations you cite, this core problem still exists deeply within organic, algorithmic search. We created Zakta (http://zakta.com/), a personal and social Web search engine, to deal directly with the issue with informational searches on the Web. One aspect of Zakta is a social media tool called Zakta Guides that helps people organize Web information on any topic. Citing your excellent post in context, I wrote a blog post here today (http://blog.zakta.com/2009/11/12/zakta-guides-a...) about this: . I'd love to get your feedback on Zakta, and also would love input from your readers as well. Thank you.
- Sundar Kadayam - Founder & CEO, Zakta
bullaman
· 1 month ago
Awsome summary of the evolution of search Brian. Some of these difinitions tend to become blurred as they get bandied around the Web but this makes it all a lot clearer. You do wonder how relevant "traditional" search will be in only a few years from now.
philbutler
· 1 month ago
Superb Brian, as always. A nice primer and organization of the various methodologies, as well as the dogma of search on the Web. For me, somehow we just haven't gotten there - or should I say those we counted on to take us to better search mechanisms have not taken us there.
Social search, semantic and some other hybrid forms have not as of yet approached what Google is capable of. For someone like me to say takes a bit as you know. Google, I am finding, probably has the capabilities all of these rest of the forms have combined in all liklihood. With the advent of Wave too, the social end might be tied up. The integration of this kind of tool, with Google's main engine, might be something to see.
Any way, I will refer people to your primer here, as you have once again encapsulated this nicely. :)
Always, Phil
briansolis
· 1 month ago
Appreciate it Phil!
nextdayflyers.com
· 1 month ago
Great article what I am really looking forward to is search by voice becoming mainstream, I am tired of typing! Its such much easier to speak and I think this is the future of technology. You cant do things easier then saying them.
Thanks for the comment Charles. We've worked hard at tazti.com to incorporate innovative search by voice recognition to work with Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Ebay etc.
All Comments
Charles Knight, editor
I think it's interesting to look at UGC in general - even five years ago I think many of us thought we had reached the a tipping point in the generation of UGC with things like blogs and YouTube. Now look at what we create, both implicitly and explicitly: tweets, geoloc data, photos with geoloc, comments (like this one!) with federated identities, status updates, etc etc. The sheer amount of data that engines can process and turn (hopefully) into knowledge is increasing at an insane rate.
Fun times to be in search! Thanks for the post!
Stefan Weitz
Director, Bing
Very true. Although, one could argue that the search results are less monetizable than the social graph.
- Sundar Kadayam
- Founder & CEO, Zakta
Social search, semantic and some other hybrid forms have not as of yet approached what Google is capable of. For someone like me to say takes a bit as you know. Google, I am finding, probably has the capabilities all of these rest of the forms have combined in all liklihood. With the advent of Wave too, the social end might be tied up. The integration of this kind of tool, with Google's main engine, might be something to see.
Any way, I will refer people to your primer here, as you have once again encapsulated this nicely. :)
Always,
Phil