The Search

If you haven’t already read it I can highly recommend giving The search : the inside story of how Google and its rivals changed everything a read. I found the book easy to read and informative. The subject matter was also much more approachable than I thought it would be. If you do anything with search you should really read it. If your of the type to analyze each search engine offering when it comes out then I demand you read it, if just to have a proper background. Below is a brief overview of some of the things that stood out for me.

  • "the future of search will be more about understanding, rather than simply finding"
  • "intent drives search"
  • "average number of searchers per visit to an engine is nearly five"
  • portals without real search left a vacuum that google later filled
  • human vs algorithms: "how can technology give quality results"
  • a shift happened from exploration and discovery to intent-based search
  • Yahoo used people's "clickstreams" (what they were clicking/doing) do decide on services
  • PageRank is similar to peer-review. It can be abused as well.
  • Google received many complaints about spidering webpages and keeping copies. It was not always thought of as a good thing. Many parallels to the current Google Book Search.
  • Spam has been a constant problem
  • Search as a disrupter: Music (napster) and News (pay-walls)
  • mobile and local search will help empower consumers
  • search drives commerce and commerce drives search
  • the importance of organic results and how they are handled
  • "many experts believe that in the near future we'll store just about everything that can be digitized...on one massive platform: the Google Grid" - Google Base suddently makes sense
  • "search is at best 5% solved"
  • Perfect search would give you YOUR perfect answer - think personalized
  • to have perfect search it must know you and your tendencies - personal tracking and data
  • connecting information and search for sales - think froogle and google movies

More thoughts on how all this applies to libraries coming in the future.

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