“I can see clearly now, the rain is gone…”
“I can see clearly now, the rain is gone, I can see all obstacles in my way…” -Johnny Nash
As we approach 2008, the “Future of Search” seems to be less and less a guessing game every day. In fact, looking over my notes today, I think the answer is pretty well known.
Rand Fishkin wrote back in August,”Ask’s 3D interface is clearly the future of vertical results.” And what then? “…I suspect that the other engines are going to try playing leapfrog, rather than catch-up.” And finally, “This will probably mean some very unique (sic) interfaces…” Rand was a speaker at the SMX conference, and he deserves a lot of credit for putting the pieces together (Where are Search Engines most likely to Innovate?).
A month later, ICANN CEO Paul Twomey said, “Virtual worlds are the future of global commerce.” The author of this post, Duncan Riley, comments, “It’s interesting that the head of the body that controls the Internet believes that the world of tomorrow is virtual.”
Virtual Worlds Weekly, a month later still, listed 35 virtual world companies that have received a combined $1,000,000,000.00 of capital in the last twelve months.
Here’s my own definition of Web 3.0 (which has yet to catch on…oh well)
Web 1.0 is linear. Think Google’s list of search results. One long, long line. Is #47 the best result? You may not get that far. Are #12, #52, and #70 related some how? How could you know? Try to imagine a very long horizontal line with the names of all the major U.S. cities spread out like a huge ruler. Could you give someone directions with that? No way. It’s pretty crude, and yet Google sticks with the list.
Web 2.0 is 2-D. Think of Quintura’s tag cloud (over in the sidebar of this blog), or Kartoo’s two-dimensional maps, or KoolTorch’s and LivePlasma’s circles. Now the search results are no longer up and down, but up, down, Left and Right. Now imagine a flat road map of the U.S. Now you can give directions - every city is laid out in relationship to the others. The only problem is on the very edges of the map…
Web 3.0, which is upon us, is 3-D. Ask 3-D is just the beginning. Check out SpaceTime’s 3-D search results. Explore some of the 35 virtual worlds out there (Second Life + 34 others). Now you will go up, down, left, right, Forward and Back. The analogy? A globe, of course. Now you can truly see the relationship between Ohio and Tokyo, or any other two cities in the world (Charlottesville, VA and ChristChurch, NZ are very far apart).
As for the Alternative Search Engines, the consensus is pretty clear: the future belongs to the Verticals. People Search, Job Search, Health, Video, Blog, Image, MP3, News, __________(fill in the blank) Search. Google, of course, already has these categories, and they do have Google Earth for 3-D, etc. Things are very much in flux, and will be for 2008.
The Alternative Search Engines are no longer a random list of 100+ niche search engines; they are naturally coming together into these vertical categories. In fact, I predict that the Top 100 list will have to adapt to this reality in 2008. The “Top 100″ tab up top will soon be joined (replaced?) by a new one, “Verticals,” a feature that we have highlighted every Monday since we began, e.g. The Top 10 ________ Search Engines.
The problem is that Google has the mass and the momentum of a speeding tractor-trailer, pretty much the King of the Road. Yahoo! and MSN I think we can safely skip over. Ask strikes me as this new Toyota Prius, with the futuristic design, trying futilely to build up enough speed to overtake said truck.
And the Alts? The Alts are 100+ pieces of a wicked Lamborgini - the only problem is that they are spread all over the place! Here and there you might see two pieces together, like blinkx and ChaCha, but otherwise - there they lie. Shiny but (relatively) still.
*The reason why the verticals are so important is that this pile of parts has a whole lot of duplication - five steering wheels, ten tires, six engines. We don’t need all Top 100 Alts to put together a car that can blow doors past both Ask and Google, we only need one engine, one steering wheel, fours tires, etc.
The entity that assembles the best car will hire the “Jeff Gordon” of CEOs and then it’s Game Over. Maybe the Alts don’t have to form this “Car” themselves after all, although I still like the concept, maybe a third party will do it for them. Either way, the pieces are there, just waiting to be assembled.
So, FoS = VSE + VUI. The Future of Search = Vertical Search Engines with a Virtual User Interface.
I think search “thinkers” are coming together on this point - if you Disagree, please leave a comment!
October 21st, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Excellent, precise and concise piece!
Just a little comment about the 2-D and 1-D web and the effect on search.
I strongly think that the 2-D web has died before it is even born! Thinking tags-oriented did not accomplish the intended task. We all were happy seeing some visual relations between the cities on the maps. We play with that, maybe come again for a couple more plays or demos, and then we revert back to the 1-D web, where Google remains the king. Remember: “the user is always right!”
My expectation for the 3-D web introducing the semantic search for example is better — that is when machines can build correlations between the online content.
On a last note, I much agree about your equation: FoS = VSE + VUI. The user will be the happiest though if the search can at the very ’same place’ be/display/return VSE’ed and VUI’ed results.
Hany
October 21st, 2007 at 5:45 pm
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