What is a Search Engine - Now and Future
Read/WriteWeb network blog AltSearchEngines has launched a fascinating series today. It's a 3-part series attempting to define what is a search engine. While it's focused on 2007, the series will also address what a search engine might look like in the future. The first part, entitled What is a Search Engine?, is written by Nitin Karandikar. Part II is entitled What is Not a Search Engine? by Kaila Colbin and will be published tomorrow on ASE. The trilogy will be complete with Charles Knight's Part III: What is an Alternative Search Engine? on Wednesday.
Any of you who have followed closely Charles Knight's Top 100 Alternative Search Engines List will enjoy this series.
Here is Nitin's list of essential search engine features for the future:
- Personalization (but without storing personal info )
- Social Input / Wisdom-of-Crowds (which has its pitfalls )
- Semantic Processing: of both, the query AND the content (will this let the Search Engine find Answers that we never knew we had?)
- Parametric Input: including freshness, source and domain-specific
- Rich content types: audio, video, images, news, blogs, …
- UI enhancements: better visualization of results
- Findability support: notifications of interest, a database of intentions
- Follow-up: results clustering and drill-down
- Repeat queries (as Greg Linden points out )
- Trusted sources: e.g. a slider to select the level of trust, from high to low
Check out the full article and leave a comment on AltSearchEngines about what you think a search engine is - and what it'll be in the future.
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I will add that a search engine has to have its own index of the Web or build it.
Posted by: Yakov | July 30, 2007 11:29 PM
It's a load of tosh, honestly. I've posted a full length comment on the article itself. So much rage that people can write that much crud and get it posted!
Posted by: Phill Midwinter | July 31, 2007 1:52 AM
Search engines are generally based around Google's algorithm for what a search engine is. There are three big search engines (G, Yahoo and MSN). I think that the latter two are both emulating Google. Google takes into account a number of different factors for determining placement of a site including domain age, site name, and backlinks to decide the placement of a site in the index. I think the question should be: is there anything coming out that will be different from this that many people will use?
- ted
Posted by: political forum | July 31, 2007 2:23 AM
I think that one of the problems for many sites is that they have a lot of difficulty coming up in the SERP's and without traffic, your site is going to be hard to maintain.
- ted
my political forum
Posted by: ted | July 31, 2007 2:26 AM
Speaking of Google, perhaps it's time to admit that the emperor is buck naked? Google is no longer an asset to small business. It's digressed into a black box designed to extract as much money as possible from small business while giving back as little value as possible. This piece explains why Adwords is something to be skeptical about: "Why Google Adwords is Not Helpful to Small Business" http://smartstartup.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/a-fable-doing-b.html
Posted by: Peter | July 31, 2007 8:15 AM