Musings on the technology of search

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This is the section that I think (this next section Technotech) is the section I think some people have really been waiting for. You might be one of them. If you’ve been holding out in other words for some tangible ideas this is just for you; this is just what you’re looking for. There are some things that are going to be discussed here that will really fire off the rockets in your mind. This is about things tied to technology. Some futuristic ideas but still pretty realistic, still tangible, still something or some things you can get your hands on. In many ways what we’ll be talking about is spinning some old ideas that, again, very useful and practical and a pragmatic. I like to think about this as – tangibly or practically, where is search headed? What can we expect in the next number of months or years? That is, what can I expect in terms of the interface, what can I expect in terms of the technology, what can I expect in terms of innovation – that’s boiling over right now – and will eventually land in our laps. And along these lines, what are the boundaries of search from a technical point of view? And like I’ve said in other parts of the report here we’re not going to deep-dive on technology, we’re not going to get into 0s and 1s, I’m not going to throw jargon at you. Instead, it’s about thinking deeply about the ideas and taking a critical look at where, in this case where technology and search are going.

So let’s dig in to Technotech. Let’s talk about the digital ecosystem fuel. What we’re looking at here, what we’re thinking about, what we’re talking about is, what actually is driving search from a technical point of view? What’s driving search? Where are the ideas coming from? Where’s the content coming from? What’s actually making search evolve? Is it money? Is it advertising dollars? Perhaps. But it’s also the material – the raw material that is available to be searched. That would be alerts, could be SMS text messages, could be RSS feeds, could be tags and tagging activity (and activity, by the way is very important) so what you’re doing, when you’re doing it, how you’re doing it, is as important as what it is that you are acting upon. So your actions and the activities are fuel as well. Not just the content and not just an item stuck in space but also how you act upon it. I also mentioned The Ghost here and The Ghost is an idea that I posted a couple of times now on WebWord and the idea is very much in line with the Second Self idea and putting your memory online and putting your life online and what’s going on in the real world bleeds over into the digital world and vice versa. So there’s a lot of that kind of information – I mentioned medical information as well that also pumps into, or moves into the digital world. I mentioned text messages here.

So there are many things that actually end up forcing search to change, forcing search to alter how it operates on a day-to-day basis. Let’s take a blog as an example. Every day that I post on WebWord I am pushing more information into Google’s index – and they do tend to choose to index what I’m doing on a fairly regular basis. So how often they are searching, indexing for my material in turn determines what is available to everyone else on the web, via their engine. So what is pumping search? What is making search change? Well, first of all let’s think a minute about the index. We covered the index earlier. So what’s pumping search? Well, really what’s pumping into search or what’s driving into search – the ‘index’? Also, what’s pumping search from an engine point of view – in other words, how are the algorithms of search changing in light of what’s being indexed; in light of new discoveries and new mathematics that determine the best ways to find information? So, first – first idea again – is the index which is literally being pumped in content, data and so forth. Second idea here is what’s actually changing the algorithms or changing the engines fundamentally, and the last is what’s pumping, or what’s changing, or what’s altering the search experience, or the user experience? Now this last part gets very little attention. What technology is being utilized to alter, upgrade, enhance and pump the user experience? Now, the following question here is, who is deciding and controlling these things? While the index and the engine; the companies and organizations are controlling, how about the user experience? Well, they’re controlling that for the most part as well, although I will say that user-created content is in many ways outside the control of the search engines. They do care about it – they care about the creation of content – and maintaining it, and maintaining tabs on it – but that’s probably the best thing we have going for us as users in terms of updating the experience, other than possibly modifying the technology ourselves. Lastly, the last point here is – what’s your individual involvement and what do you do that’s not to pumped to search? What could not be captured? I have some comments about this later on.

Let’s dig some more on this idea of pumping search in various ways. I like to call this ‘Touch the Monkey’ – it’s kind of meant to be funny of course – but also it’s really meant to capture the idea of touching things in the real world and what that means for search. This is a far-reaching, far-fetched idea but it’s entirely possible. I had mentioned before what you’re doing in the real world impacts what happens in the digital world and what happens and what becomes available in the world of search. So the idea here is that you touch something, anything, in the real world and when you do that, information is fetched for you and it’s made available to you without even asking. So I touch a cell phone, a new cell phone, that I don’t own; a meta-store – I touch it and I’m provided with information about that cell phone either through my own cell phone or information that’s available to – as an alert perhaps in my own inbox, my mailbox or I might see it on a screen automatically so that information about what I’m touching is fetched for me. Along with this I might set up alerts so that when I interact with certain things in the real world – that actually kicks off (this is partially a pre-fetch idea), but that kicks off a search if there’s a match between something that I set up and something that I’m actually touching or interacting with. I get an alert saying that ‘by the way, six months ago you were performing a search and you said you decided that if you touch this item that you would get some results’ – you get feedback about that, the alert could provide you with that information saying, ‘hey you’re touching that – that item when you looked last was $299, now it’s $198’. Next idea is link building and feed building so again you’re in the physical world, you’re in meatspace, again you touch something; you touch this cell phone that I’m using as an example and let’s say you’re at Target, you’re at Wal-Mart, you’re at some department store, Circuit City; wherever you might be and when you do that, that fires off a query or a search or an alert that is in effect a search. That in turn, when you get home and you check your inbox and you go to your browser, you’re hunting around – there is a list of information tied to what you touched in the department store or in the environment that you’re in. So there’s no reason why this can’t be done, there’s no reason why what you’re doing in the physical world can’t help you find things and again, we talk about search as friction. This set of ideas, while not truly well defined – and I’ll admit that – but this set of ideas really is getting at the idea of ways of reducing friction between what you want and what you actually can get in terms of information, in terms of ideas, in terms of actually getting what you want, when you want it, how you want it. That is ‘Touch the Monkey’.

We’re going to move on in the next section of Technotech. I really enjoy talking about constraints in a positive light. I really enjoy that. I think that’s an important concept and we’re going to touch it here. What I want to get across is the boundaries of search, these constraints I’m referring to, the boundaries search are defined by what people are not doing. So the space, this undefined space outside of what we know, what we see right now – that’s the boundary of search. It’s really the unknown. These are not hard, fast, fixed, firm boundaries so it is imperative for people that are working on search and are concerned with search that they don’t just pay attention to the tools we see now. And what I think happens a lot with the press and with the trade rags and what a lot of bloggers stay on top of is the next new thing coming out from Google and from Microsoft and from Yahoo! and so on. That’s the wrong way of thinking about the boundaries of search from a technical point of view. You’ll always be lagging behind what really could be happening and what really is happening with search if you look at the tools being rolled out, that are being utilized right now, of course, but also that are being rolled out right now. Instead, think about what people are not doing with search. Think about the ideas I just presented a moment ago with ‘Touch the Monkey’ in the pre-fetching idea or providing information before you even realize that you had previously looked for it. So stored memory that you might have had, or a store alert, or a stored search that might have been set for you just based on your interactions provides you with the information you want and reduces the friction. So let’s pose a question here; let’s think about this together. What tools could be made available to reduce search friction? In effect, how can we make search better by making search irrelevant? Because, again the less searching you’re doing means that the closer you are to always having what you want and when you want it, where you need it and how you need it. So think about what people are not doing and you’ll stay on track with everything you need. I think to think about search – to explore search, to explore and expand the boundaries of what people aren’t doing – I think to do that, you have to look at what’s going on outside of search. Search is one of those things where you have to look outside what’s going on in its own environment. I think what we’re getting closer and closer to is an environment or an existence where everything is everything. I believe that virtually anything can be tagged, anything can be considered to be data or information; anything that’s physical or analog can be considered and treated in digital terms – and I mean digital in the sense of taking what’s in the physical world and somehow defining that with data or as data and meta data and tags and some structure and it could be indexed and so forth. So you can define and mug as being glass, as being a certain weight, a certain size, a certain capacity a certain density, a certain melting point, so on and so forth. So that cup can be digitized to or converted into data. And I also believe that because you can convert or quantify and qualify things this way you can also network them together. You can actually network or blend or merge or connect that mug that I referenced with the water in the ocean; you can somehow connect those together. You can do it through a search query, I really believe that – I believe a query can actually bind things together combine that data together now it’s in the digital world but it’s also possibly in the physical world as well. In terms of what’s possible and what people are thinking about and what’s going on in the physical world.

OK, so to bring this back to Earth a little bit, everything could be – and I would say actually is data. Everything is – or could be – networked. Another piece of this is everything is always on or could always be on and also computed or computing. That’s why I say everything will be everything and if you really want to talk about search you have to look at the realm of the possible; that we’re always on, we’re always connected, now, is the human side of it – we’re always on, we’re always connected but also the things that we interact with are always on, always connected, always defined in terms of data, always defined in terms of metadata. That means things get pretty darn connected; that means that the searches you conduct – your ‘life of search’ if you will – they can really be thought off in extremely broad terms and the way that we think about search now is very narrow. The text box and the ‘Search’ or ‘Go’ button – well, it is currently the ultimate user interface. While that is the case, you have to consider that there might be other ways of searching and connecting the dots between different data items and so on and so forth – connecting the mind behind those physical items as well; that’s also part of this. So this is pretty philosophical, pretty mind-expansive – it does relate to the technology. Technology of networking, technology of computing, technology of connecting this, because those things do indeed relate to search in a search experience and the search engines and the search companies. Don’t ignore that.

I’m going to go out on a limb and I’m probably going to make a fool of myself either now, or I’ll look back on this and think that what I say to this is wildly wrong or extremely foolish. But the power of cell phones cannot be overlooked and I’m bringing up cell phones by the way to make this a little bit more tangible and real world and so we’re not completely in the clouds here – it’s about technology after all. But search as it’s conceived right now – Internet search is very much tied to web browsers. The vast majority of searching the that’s conducted is done via a web browser or web browsers so when you conduct a search and when you think about search when I mention search even this report as to listen to it are probably thinking search as it’s tied to the browser and I’d even talked about that myself. I did it earlier when I spoke about the text box and the ‘Go’ and the ‘Search’ button and that being the ultimate experience. I think what’s going to end up happening – I don’t know whether it’s going to be sooner or later, but search as a paradigm is definitely going to migrate to cell phones. We could talk about search as it relates to text; text searches and web browsers but you can also talk about search as it relates to cell phones and what people say, what they speak and how that translates to a search experience. So cell phones and verbal search put together just as text search and browsers go together; I think you’re going to see this migration. But what I don’t want to lose sight of here in this comment is that I don’t think that means in any way that search as it relates to the browser is going to go away. Instead, I think the key point to take away about my comments about cell phones – the major point to take away is really that the way the information will be accessed, the way the data will be accessed and in particular the way the searches are conducted, that’s going to be spread over many different interfaces, many different platforms and this is an easy and overlooked idea and an easy to overlook concept. What does that mean in terms of the user experience bringing it back to some of the topics that we look at with the blogging and the other articles that are put together for WebWord. So eruption in voice search is imminent but that doesn’t mean the demise of browsers and searching via browsers – not in any sense at all.

I want to bring the Technotech section to a close by really consolidating all this under one umbrella of a use case and I’m going to pose it as a question. So why is it – again thinking about the constraints and the boundaries – but why isn’t it the case that you as a user, why can’t you speak into the air and get the answers you need? Why isn’t that possible? Because conceivably that is a possibility. Why aren’t people thinking about that as a possibility? You’re in your car and you ask for directions to get somewhere. You’re not even really interacting with any tools, you just really speak into the air, “How do I get to location X – how do I do that?” and a voice comes over the speakers and you get your answer. “Do I take a left here or take a right?” and the answers come back. The computing power is there; at least most of the computing power required is there. The speech to text is there. What’s preventing us from doing that? Does the marketplace not support that? Why can’t you speak into the air and get those answers you need – why can’t you talk to your cell phone and get the answers you want to, which is really conducting a search – asking questions. Think about search as a question-asking and answering exercise. Why can’t you talk to your TV why can’t you talk to devices? Why can’t you speaking into the air and get what you want? The computing power is all around us; why isn’t this possible? I think a lot of it is that people are thinking about what can be solved so we can look at the marketplace. Another piece of it is I don’t think people have – they’ve decided not to think broadly. I think in many cases even though this is, I believe, one or two incremental steps forward, people see this kind of idea of speaking into the air or speaking to devices I think they see that as radical and a radical leap forward and a major step – too big of a step. Many other steps need to be taken first; I think that’s the thinking behind this. But let’s wrap this up. Why isn’t it the case that what is fed into the digital ecosystem – what’s pumping search – and why isn’t it the case that when I touch things, that feeds search as well and why isn’t it the case that we think about everything being data and everything being computing why isn’t it the case that a cell phone can’t be used for easy and effective searches? This is probably the key point to wrap at this all up because many of these questions seem technical but in effect they’re not. Instead, these are human issues; these are idea issues they’re big thinking for provoking ideas.Why hasn’t it happened? It hasn’t happened because people have chosen not to take the action.