Search: The next five years.

[Mike Grehan]

AdrianB said: My first impression of this was 'wow' followed by a 'oh' as is 'oh, what will the major search engines do when their ad revenue goes down because the searchers are pulling in organic results without 'their' paid ads?'.

Adrian, it's a very interesting observation. Rollyo had so much exposure within the industry and technology press as a whole – but only a little dent into the consumer/end user side.

I think, certainly in the future, the Google standard of your 2.8 word query returned 14,200,000 results… Of which you'll only look at the top three, of course...

Being swamped in a deluge of results, which, generally speaking, after the first couple of pages the relevancy drops like a stone, doesn't have a novelty value anymore. People actually expect a much richer experience on the web.

Part of the problem is that, in our industry we look at the search engine as a black box - we have no real idea exactly what's in it. And yet, it's the same the other way around. The search engine looks at you the end user, and you're the black box. The more you let Google (or any search engine) know about you, the more granular and refined the results can be.

Given that you could take something like Rollyo and up its performance to more of a learning machine, the more personalized the results could be. So, all search engines want you to get involved in personalizing your results. Log in, tell us about yourself, let us track your search history, that sort of thing.

The big question though is, who's ad results would you see in a search aggregator?

Well, I certainly see traces of Google's personalized search moving slowly towards a search aggregator type of service. And if they did, you'd be able to get the best of Google's results and Yahoo and MSN and any verticals and news and blog sites etc. etc. all in one place in front of you. With AdWords next to them, of course.

So the next question is... Who is going to develop the search aggregator version of Tivo? And that way I'll just skip all of the ads

In my ClickZ column today, I'm talking about the voice of the end user and how much of a say they should have in ranking results. I'd be very keen to hear anyone else's thoughts on the subject.

[pedro5000]

Hi Mike,

I've always enjoyed your thought provoking columns.

Your comment at the end of the last one...

And then it occurred to me that there is, in fact, a huge, global search engine with results powered by the end users.

It's called AdWords!

...got me thinking. One thing that may happen in the "future of search" might be that Google and the rest may be forced by legislation to split the paid and organic parts of their businesses.

By examining the data available to it in Adwords, Google can see which retailer sells a lot of a particular product. I can't think of a better "explicit signal" of a sites relevance than the fact that it sells more of a particular product than anyone else.

So, Google should use that data to bump that site to the top of the organic search results for a term related to that product shouldn't they? But, of course that would conflict with their paid search business...

Whilst we all trust Google not to be evil. Is it really fair to let them regulate themselves?

[Webmaster T]

Name a single regulated industry that wasn't ruined or become more costly by said regulation and you have a point... otherwise, better the "potential evil" we know then the evil regulation causes for everything it touches! Gov't and regulators F everything up! Google, IMO, don't mess with that they know what drives revenue and searches. You need look no further than Yahoo! for that lesson!

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

I don't have enough time to follow the whole discussion, but hope I can still chip in as I'd like to comment something on one of your first posts Mike:

I'm not sure if allowing more people voting (by allowing people w/o websites to vote) would mean the results would be better for a certain reason:

I've often thought of search and links and voting as an analogy to political voting. I'm 25 and didn't vote the last two times. The reason is, I really don't know a lot about politics, actually I know almost nothing about politics.

Democracy sounds great, but in reality how many people who vote really know what's going on? I bet a really tiny percentage of them do. I see this in all areas of life. People know just a tad bit about a certain topic, but feel like they should have a strong opinion on everything they know a little bit about.

But often if you actually know the topic you realize how bad and flawed their decision-making (which is based on superficial knowledge) is. Example: Listen to a few people who've heard a bit about SEO without really learning about the topic. They'll say stuff such as "ah the search engines..just stuff your meta tags with keywords and you'll be doing fine " or "SEOs should all be locked up. Only because of those SEOs search engines have to spend millions of dollars in order to keep on finding new ways to rank webpages". I have seriously heard those two (and A LOT of other such reasoning coming from people who have just a little knowledge on a certain subject, but feel like they have the right to have a strong opinion on it).

I think in English they say "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" and in politics the majority of people in a democracy make their decisions based on "a little knowledge", imho.

To be quite honest, I think I (and a ton of people I know - maybe that has to do with my age, but I think many more mature people would have to be included) should NOT be allowed to vote, because my knowledge of politics is close to zero (what's even more absurd is that most people would tell me it's wrong that I haven't gone voting - despite the fact that I dont know crap about politics...). To drive a car you need a driver's license, but to vote a president (who can make decisions for the whole country and start wars, etc.) you just need to be 18 (or 16) hehe .

Sorry for brabbling, but I think a lot of times having more people 'vote' to make a decision is worse than having a select few people vote. In politics I'd like the idea, that everybody who wants to vote should pass a test on 'politics' before they're allowed to do so (but the problem with this would obviously be that this would give an edge to extreme parties (including strong right/racist parties)).

I've thought about this quite a bit and to be honest, if I had to make a decision and a handful of people who are very educated on a certain topic and who I consider to be brillant would give me one piece of advice, and another 100,000 people who are not very educated on the topic and are less intelligent than those handful of people.....I would go with the advice of the handful of brillant, educated people (almost) everytime. Extreme example: Ask 100,000 people from the general population what to do to get good rankings in the search engines and ask 5 people who are doing SEO for a living, who's opinion will you go with? easy decision.

Sorry for brabbling........but because of this (I've thought about decision making and voting, etc. a ton) I think that allowing everyone to vote might be worse than only allowing people who have taken the time to create a website on their topic to vote, because they will usually make the better decision.

I think there's a place for usage data (if u can find a way to leverage that to create better rankings as a search engine), and maybe there's a good use for social tagging, too. But I think allowing more people to vote might not necessarily increase the quality of rankings - if those people know less on average.

Maybe search engines should allow people to vote by tagging if they have a rich internet history in their field (which would show that they are probably educated about the topic) - power accounts or something? The higher the reputation in a certain field the more their 'vote' should count.

P.S.: I'm just not voting at the moment, I'll probably go voting in the future when I learn more about politics.