Transcript

Thursday September 11, 2008

The Future Of Search According To Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience at Google recently shared her perspective on the future of search, including where it has the potential to evolve over the next 10 years. In order to more easily meet users needs, search will have to evolve in 4 separate ways, according to Mayer, including modes of search, the integration of rich media, personalization, and language. Mayer goes on to say, the improvement of modes will result in advanced accessibility and ease when searching for information, including the integration of voice and natural language search, and other forms such as searching by picture, or song instead of limited to keyword search most commonly used today. The integration of rich media will evolve to provide users with an answer to search queries versus the linear list of 10 independent results, according to Mayer. Universal Search, released last May, is just the beginning of this change. Over the next 10 years, as search engines continue to improve, personalization will play a large role as search engines begin to understand more about the individual user to provide more specific and tailored results, based on such things as location and tapping into users social graph to deliver the more likely result. Lastly, the advancement of language translation will serve to improve search over the next 10 years by widening the availability of information, so that information can be translated and delivered in any language. Mayer concludes by stating quote,

"Search is a 90-10 problem. Today, we have a 90% solution... However, that remaining 10% of the problem really represents 90% (in fact, more than 90%) of the work."

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/future-of-search.html

[edited by: Vanessa_Zamora at 5:23 pm (utc) on Sep. 11, 2008]