Sunday, 2 August 2009
The Future of Search: Mass Customisation
If you go to Google.com and do a search, what do you notice? Or rather what do you not notice? If you’re like most users online, you’ll disregard about 99% of the results Google throws back at you. Just think about it, you’ve got thousands and thousand of search result available to you and you’ll probably only look at the top 5. When we consider the inefficiency of this approach isn’t it time for search to evolve to be more meaningful to ‘me’?
We’ve evolved, we’ve outgrown search engines (which haven’t fundamentally changed much in the past few years). For example, if you use the clever internet music services Pandora or Spotify. Chances are that you didn’t find them by searching Google for ‘free internet radio’. It’s a lot more likely that a blogger your trust, or a friend on facebook or a contact on Twitter mentioned them. Same thing with cool new online services, a friend might have emailed you the link or one of the bloggers you respect might have discussed it or reviewed it. Increasingly we’re ‘finding’ things we’re interested in rather than having to search for them.
There’s a lot of talk about real time search now as the next big thing. Although I agree this is of potential huge importance, I think just talking about speed misses a key point. Quality. People don’t just search Twitter to find out the latest breaking information, they search Twitter because it’s (more or less) human filtered. There’s quality there. Or at least there’s an opinion to help us gauge the value (to us) of a link we might click through to.
Google in particular might have had this issue in mind when it launched it’s controversial SearchWiki service where users could favourite and ‘vote’ up links on search results pages. This added an interesting and potentially useful layer to current search results, but perhaps it didn’t go far enough.
There’s great potential both from a usability and commercial perspective, to upgrade and enhance search. If you know the blogs and news sources, facebook friends and Twitter contacts I interact with, why not colour or filter my search results through these lenses. Why does everyone get the exact same search results presented to them? Instead of 15 pages of useless results, let me tell you which blogs I trust and then you can bring me back search results from them only (I won’t read the other ones anyway). What are my friends on Twitter/Facebook saying about the subject I’m looking for? Filtered through these lenses, search results are factors of times more interesting to me, you’ll probably be a lot more successful selling me stuff my peers/friends are buying too so there’s commercial logic in this approach.
If we can move the debate about search past complex algorithms and corporate posturing and egos, it might be able to develop into something that genuinely useful. If not there’s always room for innovative upstarts to swoop in and take advantage of the wider move to mass-customisation. If it works for other things, why not search?
· · · · · · · · · ·
