Search Computing Blog

In a recent blog post, Jim Jansen discusses about the outcomes of an expert study, funded by Microsoft, about the future of search.

The Future of Search

The study, which involved 54 search experts from U.S., EMEA and Asia, is available here; it contains the following major findings, all related with the Search Computing goals:

• Search will increasingly structure a wider range of data (social, UGC, video).
• Users want more than links to sites and documents with matching key words. They expect the engine to figure out what they really need.
• Aggregation of Data Silos: the search silo (index, history) will merge with other silos (social, location, purchase info, rich media, mobile apps) to give users what they want in fewer clicks.
  • For a movie, you might want to show info from different silos – expert reviews, friends comments, show times.
• Search Engines must extract more value from social data, possibly using semantic/natural language, and cultural inference to understand what people are really seeking.
• Search will be more and more ubiquitously enacted (PC and mobile).
• Community participation will play a greater role in search quality, using the social graph as filter (as, for instance, in Blekko), or using UGC to augment search results.
• Search engines will shift towards providing personalized results that leverage user history and context.
• Search engines will become more conversational as they go back and forth with users to refine a user’s query.
• Specialized vertical search sites are growing: users use vertical websites and apps to get faster, more relevant and more streamlined results. Mobile vertical apps are becoming increasingly popular because they reduce the number of clicks required.
• Real-time search will grow, but not everything requires freshness: explosion of real time information via Facebook and Twitter will drive user demand for fresh and new data, but everything does not need to be fresh to be actionable and interesting.
  • Nice example: MIT Sensable Cities project allows users to access real time data streams captured via cell phones as they move in urban spaces http://senseable.mit.edu/.
• There will be a growth of different UI paradigms for displaying information that is more relevant to the context of specific search query.
• The results experience will move from text and links to visually rich results, surfacing, for example, maps, weather charts/tables and other visualization of data as part of the result.
• Q&A will be important, expecially when obtained through community building.

We thank Alan Dix for suggesting the source of this blog post.

Image via Wikipedia

The IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering has just published a Special Issue of its Bulletin on “New Avenues in Search”.

Contents

Letters

• Letter from the Editor-in-Chief, David Lomet
• Letter from the Special Issue Editor, Sihem Amer-Yahia

Papers

• A Characterization of Online Search Behavior, Ravi Kumar and Andrew Tomkins
• Kosmix: Exploring the Deep Web using Taxonomies and Categorization, Anand Rajaraman
• Flexible Querying of Personal Information, Amelie Marian and Wei Wang
• iMeMex: From Search to Information Integration and Back, Jens Dittrich, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles and Lukas Blunschi
• Challenges, Techniques and Directions in Building XSeek: an XML Search Engine, Ziyang Liu, Peng Sun, Yu Huang, Yichuan Cai and Yi Chen
• Searching Shared Content in Communities with the Data Ring, Serge Abiteboul, Neoklis Polyzotis
• The Social Future of Web Search: Modeling, Exploiting, and Searching Collaboratively Generated Content, Eugene Agichtein, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, and Hongyuan Zha