The Yahoo! Search Blog posted a continuation of their Andrei Broder interview series yesterday (installment 2 of 3 – we gave part 1 a shoutout here), in which the VP of emerging technologies expounds on Dilbert cartoons, the improvements since the Jurassic period of search – a time when Alta Vista’s Tyrannosaur ruled the landscape – and the industry’s ‘next phase,’ which he describes as “search without a box.”
Citing GPS-equipped cars as an example – automotive references are a recurring motif – Broder imagines that search will soon provide more and more information “in a context without actively searching,” in effect “going from 2.7 words per query to 0!” Today’s navigation systems, for instance, show you the locations of gas stations along your route, and travel sites return weather reports and hotel suggestions for destination locales. A couple of years from now, he hopes, the information would be provided in “less constrained” contexts, and on an as-needed bases – telling drivers the locations of gas stations only when the car is low on gas, for instance. He says that search will “move from information retrieval to information supply.”
This speaks to the trend toward search personalization; obviously search engines aren’t going to be able to read minds or tell the future, but in order to predict users’ (or a “class of equivalent users’”) wants and needs, engines will require more pertinent information, and more of that information – whether it comes from your Honda’s gas tank or your Yahoo! Shopping search – will have to be personal, if not uncomfortably intimate. Broder does note that in terms of the information supply, “there is a fine line between annoying and useful.” We would hope engines apply this warning to information retrieval as well.
What’s interesting is that Broder seems to think that in the transition to the next phase, search should take its cues from advertisers, because they rely as much as anyone on the abilty to place information in the most relevant contexts. “…Advertising is a form of contextual information supply…Information supply as a science will continue to grow because of advertising.”
