The Future of Search
I’ve spent the last couple of days at the inaugural BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. While there have been numerous mentions of search, there has been little that was blogworthy for a search marketing blog. One session, “A Futurist Look at Web 10.0″ was different. The presenter, Thomas Frey, is executive director and senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute.
He pointed out several areas where search is effective today:
- Text to text
- Text to image
- Text to audio
- Text to video
There are a number of areas where search is not effective today:
- Image to image
- Image to video
- Audio to audio
- Video to video
In other words, we only have effective search when the input mechanism is text.
In the future, we will be able to search on smell, taste, texture, reflectivity, harmonic vibration, or even specific gravity. I wonder how many of these are being worked on by Google currently.
Thomas also pointed out that while we have effective search online. We have very rudimentary search abilities in the real world. He used the example of losing his glasses. He couldn’t exactly connect to Google and have it tell him where the glasses were. While RFID is an interim step towards this, there is much room for improvement.
