| Think of today's search as the DOS era: a good start, but not enough to unleash the real power of what can be. It took a decade to go from DOS to Windows. |
| It has taken us almost as long to start imagining and working towards the next generation of search technologies. Here are some key ideas that will help define tomorrow's search: |
| Integration between desktop and internet search: One of the great inconsistencies of our computing world has been the disconnect between being able to search the web much more easily than our own desktop computer. |
| This is beginning to change with the emergence of desktop search utilities like Copernic, Blinkx and Hotbot's desktop search toolbar. What is still missing is seamless integration between our personal data (spread across emails, attachments, IM logs and documents) and the web. |
| Better visualisation and navigation tools: Is a set of pages, each with 10-20 results, the best way to navigate the millions of search results that can show up? |
| Only now are ideas from information visualisation (for example, Groxis) making their way for viewing search results. By clustering results and providing visualisation techniques, it should be possible to provide rich interfaces for navigation. |
| Real-time search: The current model involves search engines crawling web pages every so often and including them in their search results. This means that at times it can be several days before new updates on a page can show up in search engine results. |
| There are two ways to address this problem: websites can notify search engines via a "ping" when they are updated (much like weblogs do to sites like weblogs.com), and search engines can dynamically query specific databases via web services APIs to deliver results (much like Google's own API offers). |
| Another approach has emerged with narrowly focused RSS- and XML-based search engines like Feedster, Technorati and PubSub.com. |
| Searchstreams analysis: What searchstreams offer, according to John Battelle of Searchblog, is the "ability to capture and record your search history as well as the things you looked at, all in one package." |
| Battelle, who is also writing a book on search, explains further: "What I really wish for, both to tell the story of my search, and to annotate my book, is the ability to take that searchstream and turn it into an object "� a narrative thread of sorts, something I can hold and keep and refer to, a prop to aid in the telling and retelling of how I came to my answer. |
| Tracks in the dust, so to speak, so others can follow and make their own, or follow mine and see (and question!) how I came to my conclusions. |
| Imagine, I thought to myself, if instead of footnotes and citations, I could append searchstreams..." Next-generation infoware tools like Furl (recently acquired by Looksmart) and del.icio.us are already working to enable some of this. |
| Searchstream analysis could also be used to add context and personalisation to search. Searchstreams also offer a foundation to construct Vannevar Bush's vision of the Memex. |
| Multimedia search: Our world of data has grown to beyond search. Even though there is image search available on search engines, it is restricted to the text and keywords associated with the images. |
| What is needed is the ability to look inside sound files, images and videos and allow search based on the content. This becomes especially important in the context of the growing ease of generating and publishing multimedia content via cellphones. |
| Mobile devices: Talking of cellphones, it is going to become increasingly important to support a quality search experience on these devices. |
| The current search results are best shown on a web browser. So the focus for search needs to be on providing accurate results in the form of micro content that can be sent and displayed on mobile devices. Not only does this mean a different format, but it could also mean providing location-based information. |
| Local search: Much of our life is spent in neighbourhoods. It is quite hard to find local information, in the vicinity of where we live and work. It is estimated that a quarter of the searches performed on search engines have a local flavour to them. |
| Being able to integrate the results with maps, directions and other neighbourhood-specific information can make search engines much more relevant. This is where search engines like Yahoo and Google will compete head-on with classifieds and yellow pages. |
| Vertical search: Chris Sherman wrote on SearchEngineWatch: "Searchers are becoming more sophisticated, and are learning that general purpose search engines are not always the best choice for every type of search." |
| Because these search engines have a narrower focus and limited domain, they can offer specialised utilities for a richer experience. An example of vertical search engines is GlobalSpec, which focuses on the engineering industry. |
| The state of search is very much like the way the scientific world was in the seventeenth century until Issac Newton came along and helped lay the foundation for the world ahead with his theories and inventions. |
| A similar revolution is needed in the world of search. Can we in India play a role, just as we did in some of the mathematical discoveries many centuries ago? |
| Rajesh Jain is managing director of Netcore Solutions Pvt Ltd. His weblog is http/www.emergic.org. He can be contacted at rajesh@netcore.co.in |
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