What is the future of search?

What is the future of search?

Search appears to be progressing into a split personality, depending on the type of data search being performed. At the moment we are using one tool (of visitor’s choice) to perform all search for data. That will continue to become more cumbersome as the data set available on the Internet grows.

1. Educational data – A significant amount of search is done in “stream of thought” for educational purpose. I apply education very broadly here as it could be a student researching Taiwan or a consumer completing research for a future purchase. Either way, this is neither life nor death, or is there an imminent purchase/decision to be made. The visitor is learning for future reference.

In this case the volume of data available on the Internet is an overwhelming burden. The searcher becomes bogged down in similarly-presented data with no guidance towards authority. The searcher is literally charged with finding data as well as discerning truth/authority.

I believe enhanced (matrix) search tools will begin to help this searcher find their way. Search tools will evolve additional relevancy based upon not only standards-driven user input but also statistical analysis of more finite pieces of data. We will see search results to data subsets versus the whole. No longer will the search be based upon an entire work so much as a piece of that work validated by user input with further statistical analysis of the search tool itself.

2. Consumable data – In this case I’m speaking of a visitor searching for data that will help them complete a timely (imminent) task such as location of a person, place, or thing. My expectation is that we will see a focus into highly-localized search (based upon known location) combined with some level of augmented reality tools.

The technology to ascertain the visitor’s location is already a simple matter. Resolving that to the data pertinent to that known location is only a matter of time. At the moment this data/location relationship is reliant on business and user data to be manually input and verified. It is only a matter of time before the processing and storage resources are applied to an intensive attack on this problem.

Once data is solidly tied to location, then some use of augmented reality will begin to pay off. A visitor will continue to search for a “keyword/thing” in a location and find a point of purchase for that item in a nearby store but computers will take it one step further.

I see visitors pointing their phone’s camera lens at an item and clicking a button. The image will be captured, combined with geolocation and proximity to data. Then the search engine will reply to the visitor with the question for refinement - “Do you want to know about that thing? Do you wish to purchase?”

Message Order Importance

Typically when building pages we see clients put together a list of links or information and put their most important information at the top, and the least important information at the bottom. This is a common practice for many sites, but Primacy and Recency Effects may cause a need to re-think this strategy.

A Primacy Effect is the chance that an item shown earlier in a message has a higher chance of being remembered by a receiver.

A Recency Effect is the change that an items at the end of a message has a higher chance of being remembered by a receiver.

Both Primacy and Recency Effects come into play, depending on a message receivers involvement with the message. Highly involved receivers (those who are actively reading your content) tend toward putting more weight on items earlier in the message. Low involvement receivers (those who are not processing the information in an active manner) will put more weight on items at the end of a message.

A quick overview of "Primacy and Recency Effects on Clicking Behavior" from the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication:

Testing random order lists, where every item is the list is shown in each position over time, the most clicked item was the first in the list, while the second most clicked item was the last. This suggests that while some viewers are centrally processing the message, which leads to the primacy effect, there are slightly fewer people viewing peripherally, which leads to the Recency Effect.

This would suggest that when creating content, and choosing the order of the message/links/list that your most important information should be listed first, but that your least important should not be last. The last part of the message should be something that holds importance to receivers and can influence in a positive manner.

An example of this would be to perhaps not only put your main navigation across the top of your web site, but also to repeat that navigation at the bottom of the page to influence peripheral receivers to navigate the site.