Peeping into The Future of Search:Time To be Happy for the Search Engine Marketers

At a recently held conference (March 2004) on search engine strategies in New York, a lot of enlightening facts ragarding the future of search popped up. The eminent panelists in the conference came up with their ideas as to how they perceive the future of search, and let me tell you, the news is good for the search engine marketers.

According to these panelists (seasoned and experienced professionals from Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves, AOL search), in the coming years, search engines are going to act like people's personal assistants, guides, mentors, furnishing them with the answers for the most abstract of questions too. And search engine marketers will be more dependent upon an intelligent combination of relevant results and ability to pay for traffic. Search engines will go much deeper into our lives, thus becoming more:

All-encompassing-This means that people will be able to access information in much more areas than now. Basically, the "access points" for searching for something would increase, right from inside-the-car Google search to kitchen, travel, repair service etc. In fact, the mobile communications device maufacturers will have voice controlled web searching features in their phones and PDAs. So the users will get an all pervasive search experience where they will be able to search for any thing under the sun.

Personalized and Localized-It would not be a long time before search becomes more inference based by learning from users' habits and location and using this information to provide relevant results. Gerry Cambell, General Manager, AOL Search and Navigation, gave an example in the conference, of inference based seach in the near future saying, "If one of our subscribers searches on ‘pizza,’ our search results will return a list of stores in their ZIP code. In the near future, search results on 'Eagles' will be different for a user who visits sports sites and one who goes to classic rock sites."

Looking at the above mentioned predictions and forecasts, one wonders whether paid advertising will overtake natural search and web site optimization for generating natural traffic. Though paid placements and sponsored listings are going to increase in the future, but it would be difficult for the search engines to depend completely on paid programs for relevance if they claim to interpret users' infrences and emotions in the future.

In conclusion one can say that search is largely dominated by the user behavior and user needs. It is the users that the search engines have to pamper and keep happy to remain in action and business. As far as paid search is concerned, it may in the future be dominated by the highest bidders. This would again be good news for small or medium players or companies in the market who may not be in the position to bid high. That means such companies will revert back to the natural search engine optimization strategies. This will make the natural search engine results more useful to the user. Thus the search engine providing the most relevant search results will reign supreme in the future search kingdom.

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