Predicting the Future of Search for 2005

The soothsayer warned Julius Caesar to “beware the ides of March”. March 15th is almost upon us but perhaps we should beware of soothsayers instead?

There is a three part article predicting the future of search on E Commerce Times.

Part one covers search extending beyond the web or “webifying” everything. Pundits just love coming up with their own vocabulary.

Here are a few more predictions.

Clustering will take off, whereby a search term will produce results in potentially related groups.

Value added search. Value added is so over used these days it can mean whatever the speaker wants it to be. In this case, value added means more customized and specialized results. The ability to search library books, desktop search and visual search.

Differentiating search results by giving away prizes for using a search engine is another idea mentioned. Of course the proponent of that idea is the company, Blingo’s co founder. Well, doesn’t iwon.com already do something similar?

Last time I checked they were not one of the top 5 engines. Buying users with cheap prizes like movie tickets won’t get you to the top. Good results and features will. However, there may be enough cheap people and bottom feeders out there to sustain you. And then there’s the fine print “...you’re limited to 10 qualifying searches per day.” Thanks Blingo but no thanks.

Google News, Customize It

Isn’t three years a long time for a product to be in beta? Perhaps the reason is they haven’t figured a way to monetize it yet. No matter, Google News has introduced the ability to customize the news page to fit your preference. Choose sections based on your country that you wish displayed.

You can rearrange the sections and delete them. Sadly there are only 7 main sections. It would be useful if Google News allowed subsections and let you fine tune them.

You can even customize a section which only displays stories that meet your keywords.

This is all nice and good but Excite and other portals have been doing this since the dot boom. Google does add it’s own spin by allowing country and keyword based stories from a much wider breath of sources but I’m sticking with Excite for now because of all the extras. Stock listings, directory links, personal reminders and phone numbers, customized weather, movies, portfolio, word of the day etc. but most useful for me is the bookmarks on the customizable main page.

Google sticks with the KISS principle for news only which some will find useful but others may want a news page with extras.