Future of Search

Try not to think about this Post as a white paper; instead, use it as a jumping-off point for discussion. This post is based on a Vision. It answers questions, but also poses new ones. This kind of dialogue is healthy and valuable as we try to think of Creative ways to improve our Clients' visibility at Search Engines and their overall marketing objectives.

- ViVEK KURiYAL.

I have been involved in media and marketing my entire career in Optimizing and Advertising, both agency and Client side. But today, as the new media marketing STRATEGIST, I've never been more excited about the future of Advertising.

So, where does Search engine Marketing/Advertising go next?

Google is failing in its mission to make the world's information universally accessible by crawling the web. This isn't because ther's anything wrong with Google, Instead it's because crawling was a perfectly acceptable way to find and index web pages back in the ninties when only millions existed.

Today, Google itself is aware of a trillion URLs, but it stands no chance of crawling and indexing them in a timely fashion. What's more, those trillion URLs don't even represent the entire web - it's just what Google has discovered so far.

"a 5-inch-long rectangle with a long list of text results beneath it doesn't do much to help people make sense of the billions upon billions of unorganized bits of data in the world."

However, Google is almost blind to non-text content. And the vast amount of user-generated content, such as Video, Images, Audio and other file types are not so easily hadled or indexed. Nevertheless, we keep plugging in all kinds of alien-to-the-browser apps (like Flash) trying to turn browsers into something they were never meant to be. As a result we've made it harder for search engine crawlers to find, classify and index our stuff.

In addition, the invisible web still exists. Millions of pages are locked in databases or behind password-protected areas that crawlers are blocked from.

So what real use will the crawler serve in the future? Maybe it'll be a backfill for other methods of information retrieval on the internet?

The introduction of Google's Universal Search supports this assumption and proves that methods beyond the crawl are required to retrieve relevant information from the emerging structure of the web.

User-Generated Content analysis. Cross-Content analysis. Community analysis. Aggregate analysis. 

All of these must be taken into account to provide the most relevant results and richest end user experience.

Change is Coming... come back soon!