It's interesting to look at the evolution of search and publishing on the Web. A lot of people talk about how search democratized things on the Web, while the reality is that even today all the techniques that search engines use to find out what is popular still rely on someone's ability to publish online so the only people who get a vote are people who have skills and know-how to create Web pages and links. Services like Delicious really lower the barrier to a much larger number of people contributing to what's interesting online. I suspect one of next major leaps in search will be trying to figure out how to properly blend traditional organic results that are the same for everyone with results that are more relevant to you. |
The search terms are so small that with a sizeable percentage of searches any human can say there are a lot of ways I can interpret that. |
Video's interesting, but there are a lot of technical challenges still on the back end to improve video. I think the search consumption with video will be different than Web search, but no one has quite figured out what that will be yet. |