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Why there will always be search

February 24th, 2008 Jason Posted in geek, seo |

In conversation the other night at the SES London after-party, a few of us got into a lengthy conversation about the future of search. The starting point was a question about whether tracking and personalization would advance to the point that search engines as we know them would become moot.

Now, even back in the pre-internet days, the library (remember those?) had a search function. You would start at the card catalog and find the book you wanted. These days the card catalog has been replaced by a terminal screen, but the function is the same. Or, you could wander the stacks - organized by category - and manually find things that looked relevant. Or had good reviews on the back, or had a pretty cover.

Search engines are the card catalog of the web, though each of them has their own version of a Dewey decimal system. Based on a couple words or concepts, they’ll deliver a set of pages which they’ve determined match your needs. Just like some of the books you find in the card catalog won’t really be what you want, some web pages in the SERPs are going to be more useful to you than others. At the same time, search results can be the equivalent of the categorized stacks in the library, letting you browse through a variety of pages around a related topic.

What a physical card catalog doesn’t do, though, is offer suggestions of things I might like. Search engines are aiming to do this with personalized search results, as are sites like Amazon (with the “Amazon suggests” feature), Last.fm, or Stumbleupon. These sites want to be the friend who passes me a book and says, “I think you’ll like this.”

The thing is, even if someone knows me really well, they’re not always right…because frankly, personal preferences aren’t rational. Even within a genre I like, some things will work for me and some won’t. I can’t really tell you why I like James Bond books but not Mike Hammer books. And if my Last.fm playlist leans towards melodic singer/songwriters like Cat Power or Neko Case, their algorithm is never going to even consider offering me any Norwegian death metal or west coast hip-hop. But I like both of those things, too.

So to the original question: no, personalization won’t replace search. We’ll always have a need to find new things, and there will always be personal, irrational filtering that a software program will never be able to consider. And now and then I’m still going to want to just browse the stacks and pick up something with a pretty cover.