The Future of Search is Simple
I think there is more to be said about improving Internet search than most would think. General consensus, for a couple years now, has been that Google owns the market and change will come in form of better search results. But I think that there is a new market emerging that Bing and perhaps, more recently, DuckDuckGo have been exploring.
The majority of people who use the Internet are not all that great at using it. There is a lot of evidence to back up this statement but the Facebook/ReadWriteWeb incident earlier this year was the first time it really occurred to me.
The reason isn’t because people are too stupid or unfamiliar with computers either. A computer is the most unintuitive and complex personal possession to ever exist. The knowledge required to simply see photos of your friends or read this post is incredible in comparison to what is necessary to wash your clothes or heat up food.
This complexity is the root in which the difficulty of making intuitive and usable interfaces stems from.
There is a lot of information on the net. I believe it is likely that Amazon provides more information about a product than what 90% of its customer base requires to decide if it would like to purchase the product or not. So why provide so much information?
The developers who power the web are the type of people who love this information. They have great familiarity with computers and therefore tend to be data starved. After all, that is essentially the underlying purpose of computers.
At the heart of data, we find search. Search results contain more unneeded data than anything else on the web. But this isn’t anything new. Google has been looking into these problems for awhile as they know most people trail off after reading the first three results. It is clear that something has to be done to provide more useful information on a given search immediately available to the user.
I’m not saying dumbed down search either. What is needed is search that displays less results and does a better job at aiding users. This can be done by displaying comparisons (e.g. multiple definitions of a word) and pictures to help them associate with what they are looking for. These are all search techniques that are available to anyone using Google or any other provider now.
Actually, they are some of the simplest techniques used by experienced users while filtering results. By serving them to the user when they search, the user is able to get a basic understanding of what they are looking for quicker.
Which is why the kind of search we do today will always exist. There will always be a need for advanced research. It may be privatized to each specific domain rather than be a general search - but it will always exist.
There are examples of this on the web already. DuckDuckGo is a startup that has a lot of the aforementioned features. I bet they are often asked the question “Why bother enter search?” and this is the answer to it. Because there is always room to innovate and I believe they are going in the right direction.
