Read/WriteWeb network blog AltSearchEngines has launched a fascinating series today. It’s a 3-part series attempting to define what is a search engine. While it’s focused on 2007, the series will also address what a search engine might look like in the future. The first part, entitled What is a Search Engine?, is written by Nitin Karandikar. Part II is entitled What is Not a Search Engine? by Kaila Colbin and will be published tomorrow on ASE. The trilogy will be complete with Charles Knight’s Part III: What is an Alternative Search Engine? on Wednesday.
Any of you who have followed closely Charles Knight’s Top 100 Alternative Search Engines List will enjoy this series.
Here is Nitin’s list of essential search engine features for the future:
- Personalization (but without storing personal info )
- Social Input / Wisdom-of-Crowds (which has its pitfalls )
- Semantic Processing: of both, the query AND the content
(will this let the Search Engine find Answers that we never knew we had?) - Parametric Input: including freshness, source and domain-specific
- Rich content types: audio, video, images, news, blogs, Ķ
- UI enhancements: better visualization of results
- Findability support: notifications of interest, a database of intentions
- Follow-up: results clustering and drill-down
- Repeat queries (as Greg Linden points out )
- Trusted sources: e.g. a slider to select the level of trust, from high to low
Check out the full article and leave a comment on AltSearchEngines about what you think a search engine is – and what it’ll be in the future.
