A little over a year ago I posted some thoughts on “The Future of Search” (Oct ’08). Since then, we learned a lot more and see that future a little more clearly. We still believe in all those predictions that “relevance” would be key to search in the future and knowledge based driven vertical search engines will provide the highest quality search results compared to keyword or NLP driven search engines. At that time, a few key questions weren’t very clear as they have become recently:
- “how” these vertical search engines will be built
- “what” this search ecosystem will look like
- “when” we can expect to experience this Future Search
First, lets talk about the “what”. Once we understand what it is, we could quickly see what the ecosystem looks like and even recognize potential stake holders who, often, are already existing and finally, how and when are probably much simpler questions.
Future Search will resemble nothing like the today’s Search. It will not be one or two engines searching all the Web for all the world wide audience but it will be many vertical search engines or millions of small/focused search engines working as a collection. Future Search will look a lot like Wikipedia and Apple’s App Store.
Today, Wikipedia and App Store have nothing in common with Search, so how can these models be synonymous with Future Search? Wikipedia is clearly the largest and most accessible knowledge base on the Web. It benefits millions of users by enabling several thousands of users who are knowledgeable and passionate about their field of expertise to publish that knowledge as wiki pages. In short, Wikipedia is just a platform that enables publishers and users to share knowledge of the world. App Store, in concept, is no different. It is also a platform that enables publishers and users to share Mobile Apps except it has a different profit motive, specifically, the model of sharing revenues of commercial Apps. Future Search will be a hybrid of these two concepts. Like Wikipedia, it will be “knowledge & passion driven” to bring the community into Search and like App Store it will be “commercially driven” to compete and sustain for a very long time. Can it bring a “sense of permanence” to the field of Search resting the guessing game of “who/what is next big thing in search is” is a question for the pundits. In summary, Future Search, will …
- be a platform offering access to search technology; the technology itself could also be built by the community or be open source like MediaWiki, the technology that makes Wikipedia platform possible
- search both web pages and databases
- enable anyone to publish Search Apps using this search technology
- provide highest quality search results to all users by searching the collection of Search Apps
- share revenues of commercial Search Apps to offer value for all involved: Publishers, Users & The Platform.
The ecosystem will include many established and young stake holders providing:
- Platform(s) like Semantifi, Socrata, etc. to enable community to publish Search Apps
- Knowledge base driven Search technologies like that of Powerset (now Bing), Hakia, ExeCue
- Knowledge Repositories like Freebase, DBPedia, etc.
- Raw Data Catalogs like Data.gov, SEC.gov, etc.
- Linked Data Catalogs like LinkedData.org
- Data & Content Owners/Distributors like Thompson Reuters, Sungard, Acxiom, etc.
- Non-profit organizations like Sunlight Foundation, Apps for Democracy, etc. especially to evangelize content that may not be of high commercial value but has high community value
- Publishers driven by purpose, passion, and/or profit
- Internet Users who will benefit immensely from this collective effort, and,
- Capital to catalyze this
While not much is discussed of the current search leaders in this context, we strongly believe they will be significant stakeholders in this future search ecosystem as long as they adapt to these changes.
Coming to the “how”, Semantifi is built with this vision of the Future Search. Semantifi will soon launch its Publisher Console to enable anyone to publish Search Apps which will need “NO PROGRAMMING SKILLS!” to publish Apps. Lastly, on “when” we can all come to experience this future, while no one knows the answer, I have a simple question: Why should it take any longer than what it did for Wikipedia or App Store?
