Future of Web Searching

The link will lead you to an interesting artucle on the future of web search engines.

It outlines the latest trends that Search engines are doing to improve their engines, and generate more user traffic (So that they can make more money with advertising)

Three main categories that are improving are:

- UI enhancement

- Technology Enhancement

- Approach Enhancement

The UI enhancements are quite obvious, but are not extremely relevant to this course. They are using the newest cutting-edge technologies. However, most of them follow Googles approach of keeping it very simple.

The Technology Enhancement is where things get more interesting:

QDEX is an interesting example, they index pages using a technology known as QDEX (Query Detection and Extraction) this does a semantic analysis of Web Pages, and tries to break the information down to be useful for “meaning-based” searches.

Another interesting Search engine is PowerSet. What this engine does is take into account stop words (by, after, the, etc). While on other search engines asking for something “by dogs” or “for dogs” would return the same results. PowerSet distinquishes using these stopwords.

Finally Some search engines are taking a new Approach:

They are utilizing something known as Vertical Search. This is the most interesting part of the article.

As the internet gets larger and larger, broad-based searche (i.e Google) engines results get larger and larger. The idea behind vertical search is that instead of sending out a general webcrawler to index the pages, You send the crawler out to a highly refined database relevant to a specific topic. They then advertise their search engine as a sort of “niche” search engine. The advertising on these engines are very focused and relevant to whoever is using them.

An important statistic that goes along with this is “A study by JupiterResearch called “Vertical Search: Early Marketers Will Reap Rewards of Low Pricing” found that paid search is densely concentrated within primary categories, or verticals: retail, financial services, travel, and media and entertainment. These accounted for 79% of spending on paid search in the United States in 2004.” This means that companies can focus their search engines on these specific areas. This will give the users more refined results, and also allow the companies to possibly increase their revenue from advertising, since their users will be more likely to be interested in the ads they see.