The Current State of Search
The other night I went to a fascinating panel discussion at the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, famous for the mouse and other technological breakthroughs) hosted by BayCHI. There were 5 panelists, representing the cream of today's Search Engines (conspicuously absent was MSN):
Peter Norvig, Director of Search Quality at Google
Ken Norton, Director of Product Management at Yahoo (UPDATE: he joined JotSpot in May '05)
Mark Fletcher, Ask Jeeves' Bloglines Founder
Udi Manber, Amazon's A9 CEO
Jakob Nielsen, Usability guru extraordinaire from Useit.com
The first part was Show & Tell, where each participant had the floor for 5 minutes.
Peter Norvig showcased Google's latest innovations, like Q & A which returns facts above the search results (example: what is the population of Japan?), search and maps by SMS on cellphones, Google Satellite, Suggest and Desktop Search ( all of which I use all the time and highly recommend).
Ken Norton emphasized that Yahoo is interested not only in people finding results, but in sharing and using them. In contrast with Google, he mentioned mostly products in beta like MyYahoo Search, video search , desktop search and Y!Q. Basically, what you can find on next.yahoo.com.
Mark Fletcher's take was that the fastest growing segment of the internet is blog content (hear hear!), and so his service Bloglines is an integral part of that. He also talked about subscribe to future search which alerts you when content containing your search keywords is published.
Udi Manler spent his 5 minutes talking about the process of taking 28 million images of 20 cities to map city blocks in their A9 search engine.
Jakob Nielsen loves numbers, and his time was spent mainly on interesting statistics. In 1994, 81% of searchers used 1 word queries, and 14% 2 words. In 2004, 36% use 1 word and 36% 2 words. He inferred that users are getting more sophisticated. The search success rate is now (2005) 42%, with low experience users scoring 32% and high experience 50%.
Another point made by Jakob was that intranet search engines were miserable failures, with only 33% success rates.
Show and Tell was followed by Q & A, and here's a summary from a blog post of LukeW:
- We are faced with more information (overload) each day [...] BlogLines indexes 1.6 million blog entries a day. This makes information about information increasingly important.
- Theres a lack of context around search queries (esp. social context). Information about information (beyond prioritized relevancy) on the search results page could introduce much-needed context for users.
- Consumer needs are increasingly being better met by vertical search functionality (products, local, travel, multimedia, personal, etc.).
- Search queries are becoming more focused on the long tail of information. Ask Jeeves has a continually increasing number of unique queries per day.
Adding to this list:
- There is a move away from early-Yahoo style directories, since search result are becoming more relevant.
- Search has failed in not allowing a dialogue such as you would have with a librarian for example. The search box is a command line interface.
- Search engines leach the value out of the internet through their paid ads (that was Jakob).
All in all, the most impressive panelist was Udi Manber, who always had a big picture answer to questions and the most interesting answers.
To sum up, it gave me the impression that there are big changes happening in Internet search, after the relative calm of Google domination of the past few years. If PARC hosts another panel next year, it's likely the participants and content will be very different (apart from Google's presence).