Will I was briefly back in Pittsburgh last week, I went to see Prabhakar's talk entitled The Changing Face of Web Search. As far as I can make out, this is essentially the same talk as these slides from Stanford describe. Prabhakar covered a number of areas including:
- Auction models for advertising
- Synthetic results versus ranked URLs
- Task based interfaces
Synthetic results and task based interfaces have been around for a while in various degrees of research and commercial form. TextMap is a great example of synthetic results and OnOneMap is an example of integrated data for the task of finding a new home. The key area of innovation (or speculation) in describing these future milestones is: how do we get from here (search as an advertising channel) to there (end-user driven experiences)? The juggernaut of one-trick-pony search only accepts incremental advances and while the monetization of task based search should be straightforward (though different from current models), synthetic results are potentially harder to advertise against as there is a break between the results form and the advertising form.
Perhaps some of these questions will be answered at the Future of Search.
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