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April 16, 2004
Tomorrow's Google and the Future of Search Technology
Seth Godin isn't the only one to be able to predict the future of search engines. This is an article we have been preparing for some time about what we consider important in the future of searches. I would appreciate your comments and suggestions:
The new Google caught me in the middle of preparing an article on the future of Google. The new look and additions are a glimpse of the things to come and they definitely show strong signals of the issues will be important for search technologies in the years to come.
At the moment I find the future of search engines technology a bit like an one-way road. Pages and content keep on getting added on the Internet with a rate that seems very hard to be slowed down. At the same time, the advancement of Search Engine Optimization as a standard marketing technique by almost all online businesses has resulted in a flood of correct results pages for keywords that are hard to index (and on the users point of view to navigate through). Google, as we all remember, caused havoc with the algorithm change last November that pushed hundreds if not thousands of correct pages into the double figure page numbers of the search engine results pages. These days one can find relevant results for some keywords down to page 50 (or more).
The noise of signals in the Search Engine Results pages is so deafening at the moment that I believe that it is an obvious issue for Google and the other search engines to work on, in order to offer a better service to their users. There are two important avenues that can be followed in order for this to happen: localization and thematization.
Localisation. Local searches in Google have been part of the Google labs for some time but soon we will see them integrated in the standard Google search. A statistic I read some time ago claimed that more than 50% of searches refer to things that have to do with a specific area. Proper integration of this localization will require a rather important change in the state of mind of the search engine users (and webmasters) since zip codes, cities, states etc, will start entering the keyword terms in an more-or-less automatic way. Organized properly this can lead to a massive dilution of the SERPs and definitely a better service to users.
Thematization. Every keyword/keyphrase has a meaning. Today, searches are simply glorified word comparisons without a deeper sense of meaning. Artificial Intelligence solutions can lead to a breaking up of the Search Engine Results Pages depending on the meaning of the keyphrase used or the website found. Mooter for example is a new search engine that uses such a thematic approach for the results pages and also learns from the choices that the user makes when chosing from the SERPs (Their results are definitely not great at this stage by the way). Google is bound to follow a similar track very soon and their Personalized services that were introduced in Google labs are a step towards this direction.
Will all this imply that there is going to be a new algorithm change in Google? Almost certainly. The current algorithm is allegedly very close to a thematic expert hirerachization of websites, so if a thematic Google goes into action user feedback can even be introduced in modifying weights and setting themes and expert pages in the algorithm.
Naturally both localization and thematization are not easy tasks to get right. Unfortunately there is definitely a great lack of semantics in todays WWW but search engine choices can definitely drive the semantic web forward. (Will this mean that Google will start indexing XML files?)
Science fiction? Possibly. I do have a vision though of a new generation of intelligent search engines, in which searches will be done in natural language over a semantic new Internet and with results that are as close to my needs as the items I keep on my Desktop. Google can lead the way.
Harry Tzetzos @ Rugles.com - Website Marketing Services
Posted by Basileios at April 16, 2004 03:24 AM
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