Posts Tagged ‘real-time search’
Google searches for ‘perfect search’
December 11th, 2009
Google has been busy recently with a raft of announcements on visual, audio, location-based, social and real-time services. That includes the introduction of audio search via Google Voice, real-time audio language translation, location-based searches, and real-time searches incorporating Twitter and news feeds.
There are a number of big clues to the future for Google within these announcements, and real-time search perhaps caused the biggest reaction. This was a must for Google, and unusually it was behind the curve on this. Google’s overview of the launch was: ‘Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page’.
The real issue for real-time search is that it changes the game, and although this is good for the user, for search engines and businesses that rely on them, real-time search offers a challenge in terms of revenue stream, and identifying authority and relevancy of content.
Real-time search works well within a community such as Twitter, as many automatically go to the trusted source that they recognise within the results, but on a much larger scale over Google, this could initially confuse and present a set of new problems, or force a new way of thinking for the user. It’s certainly the right way to go, and will help people to understand how the social web works, but that’s quite a big leap for the average user.
That’s where the ‘other’ engines are trying to get the jump on Google by answering a need that Google does not answer at this point. I sat through a Bing presentation on Wednesday, and this was one of the key points.
I believe Bing is an excellent alternative to Google, and offers functionality Google does not, yet, but when you look at current market share, it’s difficult to see where Bing will be able to make a substantial dent in Google’s lead, as Google can upgrade or add new services pretty quickly. You might argue that even if Bing only has a small share, it’s a massive piece of web real estate, but do we really think Microsoft will settle for second place? They may have to.
So, just how big is Google’s search presence these days? Pretty big, and it’s still growing according to the latest numbers from Hitwise, who noted a one-percent rise in Google’s U.S. market share for November. Google now comprises 71.57 percent of Web searches in the U.S.
Yahoo and Bing, meanwhile, both slipped. Yahoo dipped five percent down to 15.39 percent of the total market, while Bing dropped two percent, down to 9.39 percent of the market.
In the UK, Google is even stronger, with 88.74% of all traffic (again according to Hitwise) with Yahoo on 5.51%, and Bing, with just 2.89%.
So, if Google look set to continue dominating, what’s the vision? Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has gone on record to say Google wants to create “the perfect search engine” and last month, Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search & User Experience, offered an insight on what this ‘prefect search engine’ might contain:
“It would understand speech, questions, phrases, what entities you’re talking about, concepts. It would be able to search all the world’s information, different ideas and concepts, and bring them back to you in a presentation that was really informative and coherent.
“We have two, three, five changes every week that are visible to the end-user in the UI but we don’t publicise ranking changes. We are making changes to our ranking algorithm at the rate of two per day. Some of our competitors haven’t made any changes to their ranking function for some time.”
This vision is supported by updates such as “Google Caffeine“, which is a faster algorithm developed to literally fuel real-time search and faster applications.
The other big announcement from Google this week looks at the other side of the coin, not the search engine itself, but how we search. Google Goggles arguably offers a peak at an even more interesting future, by incorporating both visual and mobile search. Yes, I know, every year has been ‘the’ year mobile will explode for the last five years, but one thing we’re all agreed on (pretty much) is that mobile will happen in a big way - sooner or later.
That’s what makes Goggles so important. Basically it is an application that lets users get search results from pictures taken with their Android smart phones, and supposedly other platforms in the future as well.
The visual search concept, which Google also call “computer vision” and “search by sight” is not a new idea, but the practical application could change the way we search. Fundamentally all the user needs to do is use a mobile phone with a camera to identify objects (products, places of interest, vehicles, etc) and match them to search results or online databases, such as maps or e-commerce sites to compare prices, venues, alternatives, whatever.
We’re working towards a future where perfect search engines allow for perfect search; i.e. the user asks a structured question and receives a complete answer. These changes won’t enable perfect search quickly, but they are another stepping stone towards it, and we could see our first perfect searches in five years time.