The Future of Search: It’s All About Context

Most Internet users have a very clearly defined mental model of “search.” The search process is an explicit activity that includes the following steps: a user visits a destination (search engine), enters a search query, processes the displayed results and selects the item that appears to be the most relevant to their query. Search engines have made progressive enhancements to serve more relevant results and help users refine their queries, but the overall process hasn’t changed much in well over a decade. Some say this paradigm is compromised; full of spam and easy to game.

A recent Mashable post about the future of social search offered a provocative question that hints at a potential shift in the general public’s understanding of “search”:

Are social networks (or information networks) the new search engine? Or, as Steve Jobs would argue, is the mobile app the new search engine? Or, is the question-and-answer formula of Quora the real search 2.0?

Searching for headlines and recommendations is evolving into a more passive activity based on a user’s social graph. Rather than going to a destination like CNN or the New York Times, the information comes to us via the members of our social networks’ blog posts, tweets and status updates. Book, television and movie recommendations stream in from people whose opinions we trust rather than from paid advertisments and professional critics.

Context Matters

Over the next decade I expect the following technologies to be commonplace—changing the search landscape: ubiquitous computing (the idea of “going online” will be charmingly passé), full contextual awareness (geolocation, time of day, cognizance of user preference, physical/emotional state, etc.) and artificial intelligence.

The most useful and relevant search results (whether a user has made an explicit or implicit request) will take into account the context in which the user has sought the information. Consider the following scenario:

As dinner time approaches, the iKitchen understands user meal preferences, filters social network meal recommendations and assesses ingredients in a homeowner’s inventory in order to present appropriate dinner recipes. The system may even be able to order missing ingredients for delivery or pick up from a local store.

This scenario is, in a sense, search—presenting relevant results minus the actual query. The question is, how much privacy are we willing to sacrifice to facilitate the evolution of seek & find search engines into fully mature contextual recommendation engines.

Posted in Technology, User Experience | Comments Off on The Future of Search: It’s All About Context

Comments are closed.