Keyword Search: What Does the Future Hold?
TechCrunch drew our attention to an insightful post by Nova Spivack of Radar Networks on the future of keyword search in a world where we might (finally) see semantic search arrive and deliver on its seemingly endless promise. Spivack’s main contention is one we can certainly identify with — as the explosion of information availability floods our search channels with more and more results, both relevant and irrelevant, intelligent data seeking methods become more and more essential (as represented in the chart below).
For those of you who prefer words to visual aids, Spivack explains:
Keyword search engines return haystacks, but what we really are looking for are the needles . The problem with keyword search such as Google’s approach is that only highly cited pages make it into the top results. You get a huge pile of results, but the page you want—the “needle” you are looking for—may not be highly cited by other pages and so it does not appear on the first page. This is because keyword search engines don’t understand your question, they just find pages that match the words in your question.
Spivack has been discussing these issues for some time, most recently at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam earlier this month. This is the presentation he gave:
Our take? Semantic search sounds amazing in theory. But it’s something we’ve heard promised for at least half a decade (probably a lot longer), and the progress towards it has been snail-like at best. And if you’re hoping to cut through the ever-growing morass of results on the various search engines and connect with your potential consumers/audience, the last thing you can do is sit around and wait for the semantic magic to solve your problems.
Always be looking forward, but not so far that you lose sight of the opportunities in the present.
By Kyle Bunch | April 27, 2008 | Filed Under New Technology
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