One Search To Rule Them All – The Future of Search Interaction

Closing the door behind me, I enter, exhausted from the day’s work. I take a breath, blindly gazing into the luminescent space that was once my TV and start my search. With raised hands and a smile I finally understand why the new search interface has had so much hype. With a flip of my hand I find last night’s movie, it knew I wanted to watch it, I straighten my finger, push effortlessly into nothingness and fall backwards oozing into the sofa. The movie starts; I laugh a little and wonder how magnificent the technology of 2110 is…

Imagine if that was your nightly routine, the ability to search for anything, anytime, at an unprecedented level of integration with day to day life without the aid of what we accept to be the ‘personal computer’. The future holds many promises and many concerns but ultimately technology is designed to make our life and needs easier.

Search engines are notoriously predictable, if something is hyped up on the TV or through a social site you can bet there is likely to be a presence on the front page of search engines pretty quickly. Google has attempted to provide a personalised search option but to much avail. According to www.readwriteweb.com 57% of respondents said there was very little difference or actually a noticeably worse set of results returned while personalised search was enabled.

Although personalised search is a burden on the SEO community, skewing the true results that we so dearly relay on being transparent and exact, the future is likely to force us in new directions.

Providing search engine optimisation services for personalised search would make the way we work very different. The need to provide inbound links, which many search engines value so highly, may take a backwards step for other factors push through the field and take front line. Social media buzz is likely to become a valuable asset in the SEO specialist’s arsenal to spread the word and create a buzz about a new product; the voice of many is a powerful asset.

True personalised search would require a new level of integration with technology and users alike, think Minority Report. Each and every person is an individual with likes and dislikes in style, culture and influence and aggregating the most visited sites into one set of top results wouldn’t be suitable, serving up the same web pages time and time again would likely allow the giants to dominate the market.

Providing results based on what a user talked about that day or which colour their eyes focussed on the most would allow new avenues or markets to emerge and flourish amongst the giants.

Technology such as Microsoft Surface could be a portal into a world where interacting with technology is treated as a user defined experience not a set game plan with varying results. Search engines may not change, they will always be here but they must adapt to the way users interact.

They better hurry though the future isn’t as far away as we think…