Dr. Riza C. Berkan
CEO & Founder
hakia.com
search for meaning

Part of an occasional series on what Search 3.0 means to different authors.

Let me start with an observation that “evolution” is a word to be used cautiously. It mainly refers to a success of a specie that adopts and survives while the alternatives die out and disappear. This is not an accurate description of the Web trends and Web search, therefore I do not like to use this term frequently.

In the short history of Web, the winners have never wiped out all competition. There are mainly two reasons for that: (1) winner is not strong enough, (2) there are more than one need, actually as many needs as the number of people on the planet. The second point is more important as individualism never allows one-size-fits-all solutions. And when individualism survives, there cannot be evolution in the ecological sense.

Nevertheless, from the evolutionary simple-minded reference frame, one can say that Search 1.0 started with AltaVista’s rudimentary index. Search 2.0 is followed by Google and Google-likes by augmenting the inverted-index via statistical methods. Following this logic, we might say that Search 3.0 will be the era of semantics where the search algorithms will understand the query and text for a better match.

But let’s not blind ourselves by the narrowness of algorithmic advances. If we look closely, the last decade has produced specialist search engines in health, law, finance, travel etc. More than that, search engines in different countries started to take over (like Naver, Baidu, Yandex, ect.) Therefore, Web search has started to bifurcate along the divisions of people’s needs, cultures, and taste. It is safe to assume that the power of bifurcation alone may wipe out global dominance of the big players sooner than later.

Bifurcation has shown its face in other areas too, such as people powered search, and social networking search. Add to this mix the idea of semantic Web, and the increasing enthusiasm for Web standards. How about platform specific search such as search on mobile devices and the upcoming interactive-TV? As we see today, all these ideas and applications are partially sticking, simply because they are satisfying some taste buds here and there.

Going from evolution to bifurcation, we can maybe talk about revolution, and that is my main interest. Revolution in Web search will happen only when people’s search habits are changed. Of course, there has to be technology to support it. If one reads the signals right, the market is already pregnant to such a remarkable change without a definite due date. And that is “conversational search”.

Make no mistake about it, a conversational search engine is not an avatar, although avatars represent the idea to some extent. Imagine virtual persons on the Web providing search assistance in chat rooms and on messengers in a humanly, conversational tone. Imagine more advanced forms of it combined with speech recognition systems, and finding yourself talking to a machine on the phone and actually enjoying the conversation! That is Search 2.0 to me.

Once such habitual changes occur successfully, there will be no going back. Like my cat tasting the real salmon, and fasting afterwords until the next salmon meal, the use of conventional search engines will deflate away quickly by the people who have acquired the new habit (regardless of demographics.) I guess that this will be the major turning point in the search market — the big-bang that everyone is curiously speculating about.

Finally, Search 3.0 will be the “Thinking Search”  where search systems will start to solve problems by inferencing. At that juncture, they may no longer be called search engines, and the term may become a historical artifact. I do not fool myself with the idea that I will see that happening in my life time.

To summarize, Search 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and so forth is closely related to the final human experience, and the changing habits of interacting with information on the Web. Everything else is doomed to be a temporary detail in my view.

Technologies that will be instrumental in this endeavor include (1) semantic technologies, (2) operating systems, (3) broadband connectivity technologies, (4) graphics interface technologies, and (5) speech & image recognition technologies. These are the 5 pillars of the next revolution in Web search, and each technology must reach a sufficient level to provide the required critical mass, perhaps with the exception of (5).

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 12:48 pm and is filed under CEO Views, Guest Authors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.