The Future of Internet Search

People are always trying to predict what the future of search holds. Although no one person has a crystal ball for knowing what will actually take place, there are some people who have had so much experience in search that their intuitions about the future are usually right on track with reality.

One of these people is Tim Mayer, who had a long tenure at Yahoo holding titles such as VP of Search Products, VP of Search Business, and most recently, VP of North American Audience. WebProNews spoke with Mayer at PubCon Las Vegas to learn more about his intuitions and why he believes they will come true.

First of all, he believes that we are dealing with a much more competitive search environment. As Bing brings new innovations to game, Google responds with their own developments. The search industry has also recently seen changes to the search experience with the launch of Google Instant. In addition, Google has made dramatic changes to Local search.

“I think… very prominent changes are going to continue to happen throughout different verticals and have more interaction with the search experience in the future,” he said.

Mayer told WebProNews that he sees mobile search growing in the future. As he explains, 1 out of every 5 searches are expected to be mobile searches by 2012. He believes this will grow even more as mobile and tablets become more popular.

Incidentally, people use apps more often than they use the browser on these mobile devices. But when they do use the browser, their queries are much shorter. In a move that would better serve users, he said that voice interaction would continue to grow in the future.

Another area he sees growth in is with brands. In the past, many offline brands did not have an online presence. For this reason, users would go to places such as Yahoo to meet their needs. Today, however, most offline brands do have an online presence that users want to interact with, which gives an added value to vertical search engines such as YouTube and Amazon.

Source - www.webpronews.com