Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Search : Past, Present and Future

In my previous post on semantic search I discussed the drawbacks of current searches and also mentioned that it takes average 3 google searches to get the desired result.

Recently I read a paper on evolution of search 3.0. This paper described how the search has evolved over a period of time. This is what author has to say in the paper:
"In the coming third decade of the Web, Web 3.0 (2009 - 2019), there will be another shift in the search paradigm. This is a shift to from the past to the present, and from the social to the personal, and from the generic to the precise."

In short the next generation of search will be returning results based on the information supplied by the user. This means user's data has to be available to the search engine or user will publish a personal information (virtual card) along with every request they submit. These details will be metadata driven and will be used by various search engines to filter the search result and tailor it to suit user requirements matching his expertise level.

What it means is each content that is published on web must publish the metadata that describes what the content is. The metadata must contain sufficient details about the content and must be in a form that it can be interpreted by search engines. But metadata is just one side of the story. The search algorithms must be modified to make use of this metadata and produce the results considering the (published) user information. While some searches will be locations independent, there will be few searches that need to be location sensitive and the results must be valid in current location of the user.

Until Next Time...