I have just read a fascinating article on the Guardian site. It talk about an event where Google employees explained their latest products. And Bobbie Johnson gives his thoughts on the future of search.
Johnson illustrates in this extract from the his article on Guardian Blog examples on Google’s latest thinking and products.
- Google search options; a way to drill down or organise Google results more effectively, such as ordering results by time, by type (eg only reviews, only forum posts)
- Mobile search; this is growing fast, and search will soon be synchronised between your desktop computer and your phone, so that it shares queries and data between the two machines (if you are signed in to your Google account)
- More information in the snippet of information displayed in the search result, such as showing you the relevant bits of reviews through ‘sentiment analysis’, and pulling out metadata (eg a star rating) thanks to support for RDFa and Microformats
- The Wonder Wheel; effectively a “related searches” system, but one that’s displayed as an Ajax-driven spider diagram
- Google Squared; a Labs project that creates on-the-fly research spreadsheets. Type in “small dog” (their example) and it builds a table of breeds, pictures, vital statistics and other information automagically.
The single most interesting paragraph for me was this one
At a very high level, the interesting thing with all of these is really watching the directions that Google is pushing search, and what that means about the company’s ideas. It shows that Google sees potential threats not from Yahoo, Microsoft or Ask (which provide some similar capabilities already) but from the likes of Twitter, which looks ready to pounce in real-time search, and from the yet-to-launch Wolfram Alpha, which is a very powerful data munger.
So, all this innovation in the search space, blended or universal search is leading to more and more information organised as quickly as possible. In recent months, we have seen new search engines dedicated to content. Clever mash-ups based on RSS / news and blog results. Combining maps with all kinds of geography based information.
It is sure getting exciting.
