Search in the Future

On Super Bowl Sunday I and the family had dinner at my grandmother's house. We were all sitting around gently deflating after a huge meal, and because my mother and I were sort-of rooting for the Seahawks, we turned the TV on to see what the score was. We happened to hit it just in time for the Halftime Show.

(Awesome Granny QOTD as The Rolling Stones made their appearance: "Is that that Mick Stagger?")

During the halftime performance a desultory argument began about how old Mick Jagger was. I was guessing in his sixties -- one family member was sure he was 70. I took out my phone, pulled up Google, asked How old is Mick Jagger, and had the result instantly.

I bring up this anecdote because it came to mind when I read Jeremy's entry on the Yahoo Search Blog, at http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000242.html. Jeremy answers the question "Is search really the future for Yahoo! (or anyone else for that matter)?" Among other things he says "As time goes on, the vision for search continues to broaden and our expectations of how search works in other contexts increase."

I think about search all the time. I find myself frustrated by current search mechanisms all the time. I find myself awed by search mechanisms all the time. It seems to go without saying that search has a future (do you want to browse billions of Web pages? Me neither) but I think the kind of future is going to be a little different. I know what I want to see for the future is a little different.

1) I want to know now.

I feel that static searching -- one-off searches like "How old is Mick Jagger" are still going to have a place in the universe. However I also feel that ongoing searches are going to be equally important. If I'm interested in Mick Jagger I don't want to remember to go to a search engine to search for pages about him. I want to be updated with new sites, stores, and blog feeds about him. This is easy to set up on XML-based search engines like Feedster, and news search engines. It's difficult to do with general search engines. I want search engines to be more proactive about crawl dates for their indexed pages, and make them easier to search and sort (daterange: syntax is extant, but not easy!) so I can do automated, ongoing searches across lots of resources.

2) I want to browse now.

Searchable-subject indexes are getting horribly short shrift. (At least the general ones are. I've seen some very nicely-done niche SSI's.) It seems like most of the ones being produced nowadays are paid placement. I would love to see Yahoo's Directory be revitalized, with RSS feeds for every category, and a more delineated taxonomy ala the ODP.

3) I want to know different.

Now that I have search capacity with me all the time, the things I want to know have changed. I may want to know how late a restaurant is open. The local search engines are a good start, but that information needs to be more filled in and sliced finer. And some local government/municipal information is still a bear to dig out.

4) I want to know what my other options are.

Almost every community has massive pools of credible, useful data in local library systems and via paid database services. We're seeing the beginning of those resources becoming available through mainstream search engines, and I hope that evolves more. It doesn't mean that I'll use Google or Yahoo less, but it does mean that I might explore more options when I'm doing a serious search that involves medical or legal issues instead of casual questions about Mick Jagger.

5) I want to know I want to know.

This is more of a social thing. When we started discussing Mick Jagger my mother started wondering where an almanac was as I was taking my phone out. Sometimes it's hard to remember that the search tools are there at all. I'm sure that over time, our kids and grandkids will automatically reach for an Internet reference source (they'll probably have free WiFi everywhere and better tools than my little phone) but for us, the technology 'tweeners, it's going to be a task to remember that we have a lot of knowledge a few clicks away. Knowledge that in many cases has to be considered for accuracy and credibility, to be sure, and in some cases knowledge that is outdated, but knowledge nonetheless. By knowing what we like and don't like, what we find useful and not, and how we can apply it and not to our constant everyday needs, we'll know what we need, and what to ask the search engines for. We need to have a say in this evolution.

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