The Future Of Search: Your Best Friend With All The Answers

The future of search by Google’s Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience, discusses what she thinks the next ten years of search holds. I think she summed it up incredibly well in her last paragraph:

So what’s our straightforward definition of the ideal search engine? Your best friend with instant access to all the world’s facts and a photographic memory of everything you’ve seen and know. That search engine could tailor answers to you based on your preferences, your existing knowledge and the best available information; it could ask for clarification and present the answers in whatever setting or media worked best.

In Marissa’s blog post, she takes us through where Google is currently at in this strive to be the “ideal search engine.” She explains that while Google has solved about 90% of the search problem, the last 10% of the search solution “represents 90% of the work.”

What is involved?

• Making search even more accessible, where ever you are. Such as in cell phones and in cars and on handheld, and “wearable devices.”
• Speak your search query via voice and natural language search.
• Search in video or audio, i.e. take a picture of something and submit that as a search query.
• Displaying the results will change drastically from the 10 blue links, even beyond Universal Search
• Add personalization, social aspects, languages, and more into the mix

As you can see, there is a lot to go. Heck, it reminds me of the Gates & Seinfeld commercial, where at the end, Seinfeld asks about a computer that you can eat and taste.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.