When discussing the future of search, the conversation inevitably turns to Star Trek. Or Iron Man, or 2001, or the Superfriends, or whatever your preferred geek culture touchpoint happens to be.
This nexus of tech, sci-fi and advertising is often informed by several core fantasies/business plans. Imagine if you could talk to your computer, ask it any question you needed answered, and it would talk right back to you with intelligently gathered search results. The concept has popped up in numerous sci-fi and superhero yarns for decades. But now it's also the kind of thing that various search visionaries seriously talk about when pondering where the medium will be five years from now.
Indeed, as comprehensively awesome as Google and its competitors are at sorting through massive quantities of information (just how exactly did we find things 10 years ago? Books?), many digital industry executives and entrepreneurs believe that, overall, search will evolve and improve dramatically by the middle of the next decade.
Talking computers is just one avenue experts predict search will take. Many theorize that search engines will be able to provide more personalized results based on previous searches (something that's already been talked about for a while). Some speculate that social networking sites will become the new focal point of search. Others say the medium will shift to mobile devices.
Many of those who are looking to challenge Google predict that search interfaces will become far more user friendly -- either by becoming more visual, or more conversational and less keyword-oriented. A few believe strongly that artificial intelligence will shove aside the algorithm as the core search technology.
Looking five years down the road, "the things I think about are social and mobile," says Troy Mastin, a former William Blair & Co. analyst who's covered the Internet for more than a decade. Mastin has recently noticed the growing Facebook phenomenon where users are sending out queries to their friend circles -- queries that in the past might have been handled by search.
With social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo Answers, "There is this whole new wave of information being shared," says Mastin. "Whether that is monetizable is not clear. But that is information that could be indexed and searched somehow."
Nick Beil, CEO of the search specialty agency Performics, says that while the personalized search concept is nothing new, he finally sees it coming closer to fruition -- in part because of sites like Facebook, which allow brands to narrowly target ads by age, location, interest, etc.
"Today, [search] is a one-size-fits-all model where you want to be No. 1 as an advertiser," says Beil. "In the future, being No. 1 in natural search results will be less relevant. You may only want to be No. 1 for certain segments of the population. The targeting capabilities are going to look a lot more like Facebook. The challenge is how to get scale."
Another segment where scale is currently limited but has serious potential is mobile. Web-ready devices like the popular iPhone are already starting to make searching via mobile devices a lot more appealing to consumers, according to Mastin.
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