Searching Questions

During my flight to the States a couple of weeks ago I finally found time to read John Battelle’s The Search. As expected, the tale of Google’s vertiginous rise is described in fascinating detail. Where the book exceeded my expectations was in John’s assessment of the current and future state of search technology. Like our resident VC blogger Mark, John points out that existing search engines only scrape the surface of what could theoretically be achieved. The holy grail is a system that understands the intent of the user’s search and responds accordingly, rather than doing simple keyword matching. This is an unbelievably complex task as it involves boiling down the meaning of each webpage into some formal semantic representation, using a similar formalism for the user’s query and then matching the two up in an efficient manner. It may takes decades to achieve this, but some aspects of this type of approach will doubtless find their way into mainstream search software in the not too distant future.

John also develops a vision for the future of media and advertising which I believe is spot-on. I criticized Bob Cringely for lacking sufficient imagination in his portrayal of a prospective media/advertising consumption scenario. Specifically, he makes it sound like the ad-defaced broadcast paradigm will perdure, but the ads will be chosen based on your web surfing habits (or something like that). In John’s vision, people will view the shows they want, when they want, and they will be able to ask explicitly to view relevant ads (lured, perhaps, by discount offers and the like).

This jibes completely with my own expectation of how the media landscape is evolving. What’s more, it’s already happening. Highly recommended.

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3 Comments »

1. I haven’t read “the Search,” but sounds like it’ll be my next read.

   The idea of the “holy grail” is an asymptotic pursuit where improvements will continue to happen, and it is important that improvements continue to happen, but a giant application that can successfully interpret user intent will never be realized. It’ll never be realized because it would be essentially an application that can mind read. In narrow cases, more context can be predefined (e.g. the context of a recipe search application would be the universe of recipes) and intent can be more easily interpreted. As file types, content and ideas continue to expand, morph and balloon, the context for an all encompassing internet search application becomes too generic to be helpful in interpreting intent.

   Then there must be another way to achieve the holy grail, and I think it happens through the marriage of constantly improving search applications and the ability for each internet user/participant to have the ability to manifest and meaningfully exist to other participants as that relates to his or her interests, motives, requests, actions… etc. One’s online manifestation, the connected social networks, and the user’s implicit log of past actions then become critical drivers in interpreting intent and finding meaningful content.

   Search is already becoming much less explicit in this way and this will continue to be the case.

   As an illustration, MySpace has search and it also allows for users to exist by way of personal detail pages. Search and detail pages inform the ways in which users interact and find each other and find out about relevant content, topics, files… etc.) But MySpace only allows for people to exist within the MySpace domain.

   One’s existence is instantiated within the MySpace domain. The same person does not exist outside of that domain.

   I think the future web does not require others to visit a destination in order to exist. As users are given the tools (space suits…) to venture beyond controlled domains,… more of search will happen outside of these controlled domains and back in the realm of the open web.

   “In John’s vision, people will view the shows they want, when they want, and they will be able to ask explicitly to view relevant ads (lured, perhaps, by discount offers and the like).”

   I envision several “space suit” type applications to allow for domain dependent features to finally exist with the user, where they belong, not within the forced walls of destination sites.

   Then the future of search becomes a far more organic process of people relating to people and to content as they manifest themselves in the open web.

   Comment by Tony — 5/10/2006 @ 11:29 pm

2. I recently like to search with www.clusty.com. It puts the searchresults in clusters which is surprisingly very helpful.

   Comment by marcel — 5/11/2006 @ 12:18 pm

3. I do not completely agree. The problem is almost as old as databases queries where the ultimate data base engine is the one who can give me “The phone numbers of all the beauties in town”. You have to have acess to the directory (easy) but the real problem is to understand “Beauty”, a very relative and (in my case) changing-by-the-hour concept.

   The role of ads is double; one is, like you say to push products. The other one is to standardize demand. Marketing research gets it right reasonnably often only because ads tell you what a car should look like and what gadgets are essential TODAY. They make research a self fulfilling prophecy.

   This function of the ad is major and for that , messages have to be standard. If you look at TV ads you will notice very little comparative advertising (apart from pure price comparisons) but many formatting and brand building ones (intel inside).

   I agree these ads will be more and more broadcasted on the net, but they will remain standard and broadcasted. Buzz is just a way of broadcating towards a defined community using new channels and you, at allpeers, have standard messages on your product and you are right.

   The only impact of the increase in the number of channels will be to divide the revenue per channel. The cost per thousand will probably remain more or less the same.

   The tailor made ad is for finding a supplier once you know the product. That is where the search engine or price comparator are relevant. But they do not replace the TV ads: They replace the yellow pages and the catalogs.

   And by the way, hoping that the customer will ask for ads is, in my view, optimistic. But I may be wrong (how much do you pay ?)

   Comment by Philippe Gendreau — 5/16/2006 @ 5:14 pm

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