Sunday, August 31, 2014

Search is dead, Awareness is the new king

Search is dead. Well, perhaps is not but I am provocative this morning. The first search engine was launched in 1993. Since then we made an incredible progress in terms of content discovery, indexing, scalability, ranking, machine learning, variety, and UX. However, the paradigm is still the same. You need to have an idea of what you are searching well before starting submitting queries based on keywords. Exactly like in 1993.

I think that Awareness is the new king. For awareness, I mean something that send to you the information you like to get by working on your behalf with no need of explicit searches. To be honest, the topic is not new. Patty Maes works on Intelligent Software Agents since 1987. However, I don't see a disruptive revolution. We still receive alerts via Google Alerts, which is based on explicit queries. Some initial steps - but not a revolution - are shown in Google Now where the location is the implicit query. Some other changes are in Google Glass, where the image captured might be the surrogate for query. Still is a world where 95% of our actions are described and learned via keywords.

What do you think?




No comments:

Post a Comment