Innovations in Search Technology

Search technology as we know is changing rapidly. Below are some of the key innovations happening in search technology today. 

Specialized Search Engines: The landscape is increasingly competitive and getting more nuanced. There are search engines like Wolfram Alpha, which is a computational knowledge engine. Blekko is a curated search engine, which focuses on cutting out the non-relevant search results. DuckDuckGo is user friendly and privacy friendly search, which does not store the user’s search history. These engines fill a niche gap in the market and provide more accurate and targeted search results for users. While they have not reached any significant scale, they do have the potential to grow their respective user bases rapidly and take away market share from larger players.

Search Advertisements: There is a lot of room to improve search advertisements to make search also about engagement and not just clicks and conversions. This aspect of search is likely to see huge investments as it has the potential to attract the attention of marketers who want an outcome-driven search not an output-driven search.

Search Relevance: Most search engineers and professionals believe that search is far from reaching its potential and are constantly innovating to get more accurate search results. Search fragmentation as indicated by the rise of search volume on sites like YouTube and MySpace will lead to results being refined based on what site users are searching from rather than just what they searching for.

Search Retargeting: While advertiser interest in behavioral targeting is very strong, actual investment is still low. This market is ripe for more growth and innovation and likely to rise in importance in the near term.

Mobile Search: Mobile devices and tablet computers are increasingly becoming more sophisticated and feature rich and are slowly replacing most of the traditional functions performed by a PC. Search engines are competing heavily to capture a greater market share in the emerging market require the integration of new feature sets to maximize usefulness.