Fast forward to today, has search reached its climax? Can't there be any other search engine that will deliver better results than Google? There was a time when people talked about social search for a while but that too died down.
So is there a new frontier for search? Will there be a better search engine in the next few decades?
As for search in particular, yes again. There are plenty of ways a search engine could work better than Google. It could read your mind and figure out what you intended rather than having you try and write out your search query.
It could actually answer questions in purely conversation English (or any other language), like what Ask Jeeves tried and failed to do years ago.
It might have results somehow tailored to your interests in a much better way, and basing what comes up on both people/sources you trust, relationships between them and new pages and your exact intentions.
Heck, it could just be better at finding generic pages than Google is at the moment. I'm sure you've come across tons of situations where you searched for a certain specific technical term, right? And then found all the results were ones that only had the most vague similarity to what you wanted, with the term you cared most about it in grey and strikethrough form underneath the result? Even a search engine that realises you want a certain term in a certain context (say, a discussion, or a long form article) would do better than Google at the moment.
So yeah, there will be a better search engine at one point. Quite possibly one that completely changes how searching works in general and finds results that are far more accurate to what you actually want than anything available at the moment.
I think privacy is massive but that leads to how will search engines that focus on privacy make enough money? Google offers a good search engine and a heck of lot of cool free software, all payed for by ads. Frankly, I don't mind targeted ads as they're far less annoying than random ads. I'm into the outdoors and tech and even went so far as to go into my Google settings and adjust it. No, I don't like Tango. What was that about in my settings?
So I'm not even 100% convinced that the trade offs in going to a completely private search experience are worth the costs. I don't know.
What are some other problems a search engine company could focus on? I'm not even sure what the top concerns are of users that would inspire them to migrate from something that is pretty damn good, frankly.
Result quality has not really improved, all the while: more and more content is in silos that are not easily searchable. Spam/SEO/trust in content remain a problem, thus many people rely on social recommendations for content (which has its own problems). More and more content is in non-textual forms. Google (sometimes vastly) prioritizes content on their own platforms.
It would also be useful if the search engine could verify statements made on pages and give an accuracy/honesty score for each result. This is particularly important when the author of a page has a serious conflict of interest. Perhaps the search engine could tell you what that conflict is -- to help protect you from deceptive or incomplete information.
"Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."
The universally part has a lot of room to grow, and the useful part changes everyday.
Not having read the book, but based on what you posted, the example is just one of the giant leaps forward and a way they differentiated themselves as a technology and a company. New leaps will present themselves through continuous improvement and reassessing what is useful.
For instance: everyone seems to assume that search is about finding the one page on the Internet that best answers the query. Wrong assumption. People want answers, not pages. What about a search engine that combines facts from two pages or more to answer my question.
If you are working on a startup in that space, ping me on AngelList.
Interesting concept, but why would I (as a site owner) want my content mixed with my competitor's? I can see value to th en user, but what would the value add be for indexed sites?
The future of actual search is something that gets out of the way like Siri or Cortana. But there's not really money in search. The money is in siloing and data collection.
Type in a competitively commercial term like 'credit card' and think how it was 10 years back. Its amazing how they have trained us to accept this. Or maybe its just the lock of better options...
That pitch resonates with a lot of people. I hope they don't do something that would degrade our trust in that. I think they have a future.
Whether their seach measures up to Google's I don't know. I'm guessing they're not there yet as Google is good but they'll get there and if they stay true to their vision, they'll win over a lot of people. I worry because there are a lot of temptations that could throw a company off it's core promise, especially a solemn promise to protect your privacy, while others offer money to go different directions.
If anything, I see Google and others moving in a direction of using context to reduce the amount people search (e.g. google now). I think this pattern is going to get much bigger in the coming years with better AIs and more information about what the user is doing.
I think DuckDuckGo is an example of how Google's methodology can be refined and improved upon, specifically by not spying on users. It's a subtle improvement, but I find the results I receive are actually superior and more relevant than Google's, plus I don't have to worry about who is watching my traffic.
Millions of people (myself included) use google and don't worry about this already. Online privacy isn't an issue (or a deal breaking feature) for the overwhelming majority of people.
DuckDuckGo may get niche business because their privacy stance, but it's not going to help them unseat Google.
