Search 2010: Thoughts on the Future of Search by Leading Experts Enquiro Research (Dec 11, 2007)
"On December 11, 2007 leading experts on search met to discuss the future. In fact they met to share their thoughts on the future of Search in the year 2010." Webex Webinar - 65 minutes
Gord Hotchkiss was the host for panel discussion with several prominent search people from the main engines.
Participants:
Marissa Mayer - VP, Search Products and User Experience, Google
Larry Cornett - VP, Search Experience, Yahoo
Justin Osmer - Senior Product Manager, Live Search, Microsoft
Daniel Read – Senior VP of Site Product Management and User Experience, ASK
Jakob Nielsen - User Advocate and Principal of Nielsen Norman Group
Chris Sherman - Executive Editor, Search Engine Land
Greg Sterling - Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence.
Projections:
+ more dramatic universal search / blended search. (Google and Microsoft). Ask says it will be about the "interface".
+ Yahoo - search engines will be able to understand "user intent".
+ Greg Sterling - personalization and more structure.
+ Jakob Nielsen - mobile phone
+ Compares a "discovery" search for the singer-songwriter Feist at each engine: Ask, Google, Live, Yahoo. All try to identify indent and provide "contextual relevance". Idea of disambiguation is being adopted by all engines. Even Google sometimes show words at the bottom of the page.
+ Marissa Mayer (Google) commented on improvements in creating snippets at Google.
+ Another test question - when is iphone coming to Canada? Ask was weakest for current material, other three were stronger. But all poor in the summaries.
+ Yahoo, through Search Assist, tries to have a conversation with the searcher.
+ Mayer doesn't think there will be a great breakthrough in figuring out user's intent in the next year.
+ Promise of personalization - "how much traction can we get in disambiguation through personalization?" Related Search at Ask (Daniel Read) begins to help user refine the search - combine this with patterns in use of verticals. May see payoff in three years. (Justin Osmer, Microsoft).
+ Local search will advance further through personalization - and benefit mobile.
+ How people are looking at pages - divide page into sections and dealing with them independently. E shaped scanning rather than F. More attention to the left than the right. Google uses the "golden triangle" to tightly hold to the margin on the left. But new challenges as images are introduced - images and videos are disruptive to the scanning. Ask found that when they interleaved video and images with web results saw some loss of ease of use and therefore moved to the three columns. Enquiro in its studies on the same query at Google and Ask found people spent the same amount of time.
+ How to put important marketing messages in front, and keep balance between sponsor results and organic results? Marissa Mayer says there is a sophisticated algorithms for selecting and ranking - and some new methods of presentation - richer content such as video and maps. Richer format ads are coming and higher relevance with more "brand relevance". Still there are dangers that people will be turned off. Nielsen advises targetting ads based on personalization elements or simple profiling.
+ How will community patterns influence results? Larry Cornett at Yahoo has several social services - finds that people will trust others. Gord asked "Will there be a merging of Facebook and search?" Greg Sterling - social search in a vertical may work better because of shared interests and values. Jakob Nielsen - social networks will be too small - need to be able to capture across a large number of people - Facebook etc won't cut it.
Posted by Gwen at December 15, 2007 01:30 AM