When the web was young, search was all about ideas – finding pages about some topic, or providing some information. Fast forward to now and we are dealing with the need to serve two other major categories – real time and ‘real space’. Real time search is partly about the freshness of data (updating a wikipedia page as soon as it happens, indexing a press release while it’s still fresh) and partly about using the attention stream to compute how socially salient something is (by examining the rise and fall of links to a site, for example).
While real time search is about fidelity in time, real space is about fidelity in space. This means accurately mapping spatial references to their correct location (be they addresses in yellow pages listings or ICBM tags in a feed), but it also means detecting mentions of locatable objects.
The challenge facing the search engines is to innovate in the two news spaces while maintaining the rate of innovation and success in improving the first.
Do you think that real time search is a Google weak point and the begining of its fall?
Posted by: ernesto alegre | October 07, 2009 at 05:07 PM