“Search is going to be nothing like what we envision it today. That's because we aren't thinking in exponential terms.” - Stephen Spencer.

When I tell people I work in Search, they often come back with an incredulous “But what does that mean, exactly?".

To those who wouldn’t understand anyway, I oversimplify and say my job is to help websites get relevant traffic through various methods and convert it to sales or other marketing outcomes. But Search is not merely about that, and in the not-too-distant future, Search will be about way more than just driving traffic and conversions.

Although this post is about a longer view of the future of Search, we will consider the mundane practicalities of what Search currently is before contemplating its future.

Search (aka Search Marketing, Search Engine Marketing) involves anything which relates to attracting, optimising, measuring and converting traffic from search engines, mainly for marketing purposes.

Currently, Search encompasses organic search (aka SEO) and paid search (e.g. PPC) techniques. Most international agencies include techniques to measure and convert search traffic once it gets to the site (e.g. analytics tools, conversion optimisation methods, website usability optimisation etc) under the search banner.

To understand the future of Search, the key is understanding that the Search profession arose in response to the emergence of information indexing technologies, such as search engines.

• In a sense, Search is an interlocution between technology, information (expressed together via search engines and the Internet) and human searchers.
• Search is the tool or digital intermediary marketers use to interact with the human users of technologies (like the Web or mobile) while they surf/search the sea of digitally available information in a way which helps marketers achieve marketing outcomes.

Logically, Search (and its future derivatives) will be a function of and be driven by evolving technologies and how humans are using them, as has been the case in the past.

To get a sense of the future direction of search – you need to consider what is happening strategically to technology, how users are engaging with it (and will do so in future), and how Search will need to react to that to produce marketing results.

There are three main themes to consider in that context.

1. Evolving User Interfaces (Conversation Interface (CI) or Linguistic User Interface (LUI), Geo-location, Always-on connectivity, Mobile access).
2. Manifesting Social Motifs via technology (Social Networks, Open Source, Crowd Sourcing, Real Time Search, Personalisation).
3. Exponentially Progressive Hardware (Mobile, Cloud, Nanotechnology, Augmented Reality).

I will discuss the first theme in some detail and briefly touch on the other two, because they are covered ad nauseum in various other forums.

• Conversation Interface (CI) or LUI Linguistic user interface
• Geo-location
• Always-on connectivity
• Mobile access

The Evolving Interfact of Search

"Perhaps the most underappreciated accelerating transition we are participating in today is the emergence of the Linguistic User Interface or LUI. The LUI is the natural language front end to an increasingly intelligent and profoundly humanising and malleable Internet." - Dimitar Vesselinov

Arguably the most exciting (and possibly challenging) developments for the Search community will be the emergence of the LUI in common usage. This has also been called the Conversational User Interface (CUI), Universal Linguistic Interface (ULI), Voice User Interface (VUI), Natural User Interface (NUI) and other names.

One of my favourite Search futurists, Stephan Spencer, speaks about it in his video Search in 2014. (See below). People using PC’s prior to 1995 would remember the TUI (text-based user interface) and how groundbreaking the shift from TUI to the GUI (graphical user interface) was at the time. We can expect a similar, but even more exponential, change being brought about by the shift from GUI to LUI.

LUIs exist today in primitive form in some interfaces. Software like Dragon Naturally Speaking are surprisingly effective, and will become even more so as they develop further and marry with hardware on mobile phones and other devices. We can expect these to emerge, along with their sister technologies, as one of the most “important enabling information technology development and collective intelligence advance on our planet in the next 30 years.”

From a Search perspective, what the LUI will do is provide a rapidly increasing contextual intelligence. Currently, search engines deduce context (such as relevance and authority) from referential factors like links, content and usage data of a site. I’d suggest that within a decade Search professionals will look back on such algorithmic reductionism as crude and unsophisticated.

Although LUI will have no self-awareness and very limited self-modeling, it will feel like a natural extension to our organic selves. It will provide search engines with an unprecedented matrix of data context and proximity to the user.

Some go as far as to say that the step up to LUI will "trigger to perhaps the biggest single social-technological change today's adults are likely to see in our lifetime. (LUI) and its extensions, driven most centrally by Google (and all of us using the world's search platforms), now seem very likely to have a global economic and technical productivity impact in the 21st century that will greatly exceed both the emergence of individual and networked computers eras in the 20th century."

Critics may suggest that such “matrix-like” statements are too far-fetched to be commercially relevant for Search in the next decade or two. However, consider emergent initiatives like Google Goggles and the thrilling 6th Sense project. They are rapidly driving us toward a technology context where we are able to interact linguistically and intuitively with our environment, interfacing seamlessly with information and context available to us via cyberspace – to realise this is not too far off.

Geo-Location | Always-On Connectivity | Mobile Access

These trends can be considered together because they influence, and are a function of, each other.

Currently:

• The Google Adwords platform allows you to target your adverts based on the geo-location of the searcher.
• Google natural search results show ‘localised packs’ of information.
• Google is also driving geo-location data availability through Google Maps.
• Google Goggles is working towards being able to translate languages based on image and OCR.

The bottom-line is that search results are increasingly customised, based on the relevance of the geo-location of the searcher. Searchers increasingly expect this, so that process is likely to become more sophisticated as other search engines try meet search expectations.

Mobile access to the Web is increasing. Not only that, but mobile handsets outnumber desk-based access. As mobile networks upgrade their technology to 3G and 4G across the globe, better mobile connectivity and cost effective rates will become available.

Searchers will increasingly be able to access the Internet anywhere, shop online wherever they find themselves and express opinions about brands, products and services in real-time online. With increased mobile access, the Web will now be on everywhere, all of the time.

It would be naïve to think that this ubiquity of access will not profoundly affect how we do Search Optimisation. When creating search campaigns, you will be targeting searchers who are able to query, compare and react online to search results literally 24/7/365, almost anywhere on the planet.

This “always-on” connectivity, coupled with geo-located targeting will allow Search to precisely target consumers at geo-targeted point-of demand, like never before.

Married with the measurability of online behaviour, through analytics and the ability to track behaviour from first point of contact through to outcome/conversion, Search will be able to offer a very compelling value proposition vis-à-vis other relatively expensive media interventions who vaguely posit that “50% of their ad spend works, but they’re not sure which 50%.”

Manifesting Social Motifs Via Technology

Recently, I can’t seem to have a cup of coffee anywhere, without overhearing someone talking about some form of Social Media – Facebook, Youtube, Twitter et al. After Google, platform-based social media spaces like Facebook and Youtube jostle with each other to be the 2nd largest search engine in the world.

The video above presented at the recent Facebook conference in Johannesburg suggests that Social Media is a revolution in the both the league and effect of the last Industrial Revolution. Whether that is true, time will tell. I suspect it is.

Fast-growing Facebook is the largest non-Google owned property in the English-speaking world, and is having the most impact on the digital world right now. And it is only a 6-year-old tyke. Twitter is following suite – but with fewer users. Both Google and Yahoo have concluded agreements with Twitter to incorporate Tweets in their search results, as a way to try get closer to the two holy grails of search engine results: real-time search  results and high SERP relevance/authority.

Besides real-time results, we find Search Engine giants like Google driving trends towards presenting increasingly bespoke search results based on personalisation and localisation, i.e. who the searcher is, their past search history, behaviour and prefence, as well as where they find themselves.

The effects of the above trends are seismic enough, without taking into account other mega-trends like open-source and crowdsourcing. The underlying premise of open source is that people are willing to contribute to projects for the greater good. Crowdsourcing suggests that the “wisdom of the crowds” can be leveraged to achieve a better outcome. We have yet to see how these two trends will be fully applied and impact Search, but I have no doubt that they will – probably in combination with other trends like real-time search and social network connectivity.

Exponentially Progressive Hardware

"The history of technology is one of disruption and exponential growth, epitomised in Moore’s law, and generalised to many basic technological capabilities that are compounding independently from the economy." - Steven Jervetson.

In a recent conversational interview, Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, was asked what keeps him awake at night. He swung the question around and suggested the question should be about what opportunities excite him so much that he can’t get to sleep. His answer: Progression in hardware and the processing opportunities that it presents.

The thing exciting Googlers most is how Moore’s law is driving down the cost for increasing amounts of processing power. You can almost hear their technophile minds erupting with ideas of how they can exploit that to perform mind-boggling feats of informational excellence, and outpace their competitors even further.

In his TED 2009 talk, Juan Enriquez shared exciting information about technologies like nanotechnology and how they will impact society and commerce. He didn’t refer to the impact on Search, but no doubt it will impact Search as much as anything else. Blue-sky work around that could probably point towards new Search paradigms and how they will exponentially impact the game of marketing digitally.

Given how popular current emerging technology concepts like the Cloud and Augmented Reality are – this post would be amiss if it didn’t mention them. Although I am excited about these technologies, to my mind – they are merely execution of ideas that have been around since Star Trek. What excites me even more is what will come next. What mind-boggling evolutionary jumps in data access and indexing will happen once we have started to master AR and the Cloud? And how will the Search profession respond to that?

Conclusion

Technology developments and user behaviour trends will drive the long view future of Search.

More sophisticated user interfaces will make Search easier and more intuitive for people to use. The ubiquity and geo-targeting of Search access will provide Search challenges, but will also provide Search with the power to target consumers and marketing outcomes in unprecedented ways.

This is why I got involved in Search. Not because of where it currently is, but where it will be in future. We are moving rapidly towards a veritable Search Matrix, which converges multiple digital technologies and trends.

Profoundly exciting times, indeed.