Over at SearchEngineLand, Gord Hotchkiss has written a very detailed post on what a search engine results page could look like by the year 2010. For this ‘Future of Search’ post, Gord got insight from the top Search/Usability Experts in the field:
- Jakob Nielsen, the Web’s best-known usability guru
- Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of user experience and interface design
- Michael Ferguson, one of the architects of Ask’s unique user experience
- Larry Cornett, the VP of search experience at Yahoo!
- Justin Osmer, Product Manager for Microsoft Live search
- Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of Searchengineland and always thoughtful industry observer
- Greg Sterling, another industry analyst who always has interesting insights, particularly in the local and mobile world
- Danny Sullivan, the Go To Guy of search
Here’s a small snippet of the post, with Marissa Mayer’s thoughts on the Semantic Search Engine and the Future of Search in 2010:
But it’s not just search engine results pages that Marissa sees a higher level
of interaction with. She sees a deeper or more interactive experience with all
webpages by being able to annotate and markup pages for future
reference.Marissa: I think that people will be annotating search results
pages and web pages a lot. They’re going to be rating them, they’re going to be
reviewing them. They’re going to be marking them up, saying “I want to come back
to this one later”. So we have some remedial forms of this in terms of Notebook
now, but I imagine that we’re going to make notes right on the pages later.
People are going to be able to say I want to add a note here; I want to
search…Google… something there, and you’ll be able to do that.
The following topics where covered in the ‘Future of Search’ post:
- The look of the search results page
- Does search become our own personal portal page?
- Search as a social experience
- Smarter search engines
- Personalization
- Is Google holding a number of personalization cards up their sleeve?
- Will usefulness become part of a search algorithm?
- Contextual search
- The semantic search engine?
- More hands-on experience with greater functionality
- Stratification of user functionality
Read the full story here. Also check out Gord at Search Engine Strategies San Jose later this month.
