Search in the Future
Over on the Unofficial Yahoo Weblog, Joe poses a thought provoking question: Is search really the future for Yahoo! (or anyone else for that matter)?
You bet it is. As we’ve said in the past, search is one of Yahoo’s “pillars” along with community, content, and personalization. It’s a big part of our future, both as a stand-alone service, and (as Joe astutely suggests) as an “engine” that will power much broader functionality.
Yesterday evening, we conducted the interview with Andrei Broder and we talked with him briefly about the future of search. In that discussion (which you’ll get to read soon), Andrei discussed some of the ways search will evolve in the future. Similarly, in his post, Joe says:
Search as we know it today, is that loud two-stroke engine. But soon it will be the foundation for much more efficient and productive services as it becomes reinvented in a multitude of ways.
While true, it will still be built on that search foundation and we may still refer to it as search. There will always be a need for a service anyone can query and get back the information they’re seeking. Before search engines, we had librarians (and still do!), directory assistance, paper maps, and how-to books. They’re not going away and neither is the web search box.
Andrei also talked a bit about searching “without a search box” in the not too distant future. Information may arrive on you screen (computer, television, cellular phone, etc) as you need it’without having to ask. It’s one of the many ways search will be reinvented. Those of you using RSS aggregators and news alert services have seen just faintest glimpse of what’s going to be possible.
And then there’s Yahoo! Answers, one of our growing “social search” offerings. It’s available today and helps surface answers to questions that web search often can’t tackle. We’re all experts in something and Yahoo! Answers is one way to get more of that expertise on the web and make it searchable. As a nice byproduct, experts themselves may become easier to find.
As time goes on, the vision for search continues to broaden and our expectations of how search works in other contexts increase.
What’s your vision for the future of search, at Yahoo and elsewhere?
Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Search
Yahoo! that’s excellent attitude for search. But I have some gripes about other parts of Yahoo:
You’ve made a slew of buyouts recently, how about integrating all of them into Yahoo. For eg: Delicious, My Web 2.0 and Y! Bookmarks could be combined, so that Y! Bookmarks is abandoned. Upcoming should seriously be integrated into Y! Calendar.
Also, search could still more be personalized – by making it as easy to bookmark search results (similar to what Google has recently done).
And, provide all News in RSS, for example, Y! India News is not available in RSS format yet!
Just a comment to the above comment, I do NOT want Y! Bookmarks abandoned until MyWeb provides an easy way to export everything, including private sites, to bookmarks.html (not RSS/XML).
I don’t think that Joe was neccessarily saying that “search isn’t important”. As he points out, it’s the engine. His comment was more “so, now you’ve got a good engine, what are you going to do with it?”
That’s where I think that the future lies. Look at the stuff that Yahoo’s doing with those search results already. Heck, Answers is a good example of that, as are a ton of other services that Yahoo puts out (news, finance, travel, local, etc.). In fact, I’ll say that those services tend to be more polished than the competition and have a huge advantage, particularly with also providing an API for the services.
It takes a lot more than a fast and powerful engine to make a winning racecar.
I think search needs to advance beyond returning the most linked to pages that match search terms. It needs to determine what the searcher intends to find and return the information that meets those intentions. It needs to filter out the meta-liars. The searcher can easily save, retrieve and share those results. Yahoo has many of the components. The challenge is to seamlessly put them together in a useful way.
1- AltaVista and AllTheWeb should be fully developed with their own unique Algos !!!!!
What right have you got to buy them and then
ignore them?!
for example using the MINDSET example
- Altavista could be more on the commerical spectrum, while AllTheWeb could be more on the informational reference spectrum.
2- Title Tags – Body Keywords – Back Links etc…
have all been scretched and tweaked as far as this current SERPS technology will allow for relevance.
Concept Searching and LSI are the next horizons, and the start-up that masters it – will be the next Google.
3- Sadly, Yahoo Directory is being allowed to Atrophy.
4- Yahoo News is excellent, even superior to Google’s
Everyone can see the effort that is being put into developing Yahoo, and the relevancy has dramatically improved, but overall, the high quality just isn’t quite there yet. Google is STILL coming out superior for most search queries, and even THEY are declining.
My vision of the future of search, is for it to be influenced by people’s preference of the links/results, not by my preferences or my behavior.
When I want to search for something specific I use Delicious not Google nor Yahoo, because if it’s on Delicious that means other people liked it, then it’s definitly worth a look.
We can’t depend on Personalization to improve search, becasue personal preferences change with time and they are related to the subject too.
Advances in search based on personalization is not the optimal way to go, and it will disappear in the future, what will be much useful is the “Trusted Web” that contains of all sites that people bookmark them, tag them, and found them worthy.
At Yahoo you should start integrating Delicious search with your engine.
… or integrate Upcoming with Local search so you can see what’s happening at a related venue.
This is my last post to this blog, you never hear anything back from Yahoo in replies. They want us to give but they do not give anything back. Total waste of time.
Please keep posting. Your comments are read by multiple diverse Yahoo!s and feedback is taken note of.
Thank you Neil, my sentiments exactly.
Guys do something about your blog’s coments policy.
I am getting an errow while trying to post a link to your own bloh
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Here is an example of yahoo answering through actions not words. http://tinyurl.com/bvs8p
Err, I’ll fix that. Sorry.
Neil,
Please furnish specifics. Jeremy and I both get exasperated when people make general comments like that. Thanks.
Thanks for the link and kind words! I actually expected to get flamed more than validated.
Who’da tho’t?
Joe B
I see results relevance and search spam, blogs are notorious for this, as the next major hurdle for search engines.
Ofcourse, as mentioned above, concept search may solve the above, or at least should, however it probably will be some time before that happens.
I think thinking about search is useless and instead we should be focused on how people’s lives and tasks can be facilitated with information and how we can obtain that information. Then “search” will naturally follow from that.
For example think of online maps. I would imagine that before online maps were invented, they were seen as inferior to physical maps, because the computer’s screen was small and a PC was not portable. But then someone saw the value of online maps in that they were immediately accessible from any computer and when you least expect to need a map. Like, a friend calls you up at work and wants to meet you, but at a foreign location. In this scenario, there was a need for information and Yahoo maps collected and provided that information as well as a way to organize it; namely “search”.
That was the fusion part of information. Then there’s the delivery part, where instantaneity is important. Yahoo Instant Search is a good example, but even it is too slow and not accurate enough. Yahoo Shortcuts is good, but it could do with expanded coverage and it could provide a little more information on the search results page. For example, I search for “Pi” and Yahoo Shortcut says, ” Pi – in mathematics, the ratio of the circumference of… [more]“. It would help if it finished the sentence. It could also perhaps a keyboard shortcut to activate it.
One area which I think Yahoo should work on is in integrating their office tools; namely email and calendar. You shouldn’t underestimate these tools and how much they ought to be integrated together. Case in point, rather than using the tasks/todo feature in calendar to record tasks, people send emails to themselves reminding them of tasks to do. Also, most business emails contain a lot of scheduling tasks yet users have to copy and paste them from email to calendar each time. Wouldn’t it be great if a single email or a conversation of emails could be linked directly to an event on the calendar and vice versa. So for example, on my calendar I could have an event for “board meeting” and then I could have links to the various emails that I’ve sent to the board members. And the great thing about this is that it would inevitably involve “search”. As more information becomes integrated and therefore more useful and valuable as well as bloated, I need search to sift through all that information.
What will the future of the Directory in relation to where Yahoo search is going? Is the Directory even maintained anymore? I’ve tried fruitlessley to change my sites directory listing for over a year as it refers to what my site was 8 years ago. Not even people I speak to in Yahoo know how to change it or where to turn to. I think the Directory could still be a useful part of the future of Yahoo search as it’s supposedly human maintained – but is it?
The Directory is a $299.00 joke, waste of money, the good news it will only be listed for one year.
For the unlucky ones who were listed for free it is even worse, you can’t change your listing, you can’t contact any one to remove your listing. We do not want to be listed with Yahoo Directory, the title affects all of our natural listings titles, the Directory has been nothing but a curse.
Please Yahoo stop visiting our web site and keep your email, we should start charging your bot a penny per visit.
To the Management team of Yahoo:
This is my first time in your blog. When expanding Yahoo’s options for search, social and a more personalized one, think you are all missing a point: There’s an overall 80% of the world population who can’t access Internet in regular basis, and english is still the only language if you really want to find a wide range of information and images. Internet, the greatest invention ever, saddly added another division in the world, the DIGITAL DIVIDE, those with and withouht access to Internet, and this are not only words but a huge and evergrowing reality.
But don’t even think for a minute that giving laptops to kids or PC to the poor your will ever solve the problem.
Internet is like the world, lots of good things if you know where to find them, and a whole lot more of bad things that will find you, even if you don’t want to.
What’s the solution then? How do we help people to “yahoofind” the good things in an expedite and secure way? How do we get that 80% of human beings around the world to access this incredible digital world?
Thinking of that and amazed with Internet since its beginnings I developed and patented in USPTO what it is going to be the first public intranetwork of terminals in the world. Interactive terminals and telecom centers, an E-commerce and search Portal to be access from public places, PC and portable devices, the Amigo Network, that its about to be started in Panama, Rep. of Panama, and after 8 long years of hard work, might be a reality soon.
All “New Yahoo Products” that your are announcing like the social search, have been in my patent for years and are part of our BP.
We are buiding our own search machine, but I must recognize that having Yahoo or Google on our side, has allways been our dream.
Well if you can get this message to Terry Semel, Jerry Yang or David Filo, or anyone else that might be interested in hear about our project.
Yahoo has succeded in search services and is on the right way to modernize them. I find Yahoo Directory very useful but such biased user services as Yahoo Answers can’t be trustworthy (it’s more of a fun). Of course, command-line search belongs to the past but it’ll always be a starting-point of any specific query. The mainstream trend is search intuitivization. A pioneer here is Quintura with its context tagcloud. What it lacks for perfection is a knowledge base. I see search in the future as a categorised tagcloud. Using visual search is convenient and my friends liked this approach too.