The Future of Search: A Special Report
Kaila, chief blogger for VortexDNA, responded to Gord Hotchkiss’ announcement that he was assembling a “Dream Team” of writers by announcing a call for “A League of Her Own.” She christened this Minor League team of bloggers the “Rising Stars Dream Team.” I rushed to sign up. In the end, she fielded her own eight players (notice how she did not include herself - such humility!) So when she says “seven,” keep that in mind.
Kaila Colbin
The roster is:
Andrew Matthews: The Wandering Glitch 2
Nitin Karandikar: Software Abstractions
Charles Knight: AltSearchEngines
Ephraim Schwartz: Reality Check
Branton Kenton-Dau: VortexDNA
Ran Geva: Omgili search engine
Kaila Colbin: VortexDNA blog
Raf Manji: VortexDNA
And now, heeeere’s Kaila!
Seven participants, seven wise people, seven sages stepped up to the plate to respond to my challenge and join the Rising Star Dream Team. Their brief was simple and unconstrained: write your thoughts on The Future of Search. I am in awe of the contributions I received for our collaborative report. From multi-page treatises to paragraphs of stream of consciousness, the submissions were thoughtful, provoking, and informed. When I began this exercise, I thought I’d get a bit of information here and there, and I’d put it all together into one post, maybe two. Instead, I find myself introducing here a compilation of reflective wisdom, at times contradictory, at times in alignment, always intriguing.
Henry Ford, who was known for his effective turn of phrase, once said, ‘If I’d have asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.’ One of the really interesting things about the contributions on the future of search was that very few people suggested a faster horse. I’ve broken this summary down into some of the recurring themes: Searchless search, Collaborative search, Search that understands, Contextual search, and User interface.
The bottom line response, nearly universal across everyone who participated, is this: Search has the potential to look dramatically different from how it looks today. The fact that the current standard hasn’t changed significantly over the past ten years doesn’t mean it won’t. From search that goes with you to search that understands you to search that you co-create, we’re not done innovating.
Never bet against the infinite power of human creativity!
Here it is: The Future of Search.
The entire report is attached to this post as a 29 page .pdf file. It’s a lot of reading, but if you feel strongly about any part of it, good or bad, please come back and share your thoughts with us.
September 13th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
It is a lot of reading but worth the time. I certainly will go through all the details. Looking briefly at the PDF document, I believe all the team members forgot a major defect in current search engines that could create the basis for a completely new line of search engines with new architecture. RSSMicro is determined to look at the search in completely different way which was not covered by “Rising Starts Dream Team” members.
Yep, there is no limit for human innovations.