By Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist for Core Search at Microsoft.
Tomorrow, search will be the easiest way to answer a question or to complete a task. In the very near future search will have become such an essential companion that we will not understand how people survived without it -- indeed that trend is already happening.
Several accelerating trends will guide this trajectory. First, the Internet will continue to grow. Devices, users, information, and services are developing at double-digit rates with few signs of slowing. Second, the power of computer systems and algorithmic ingenuity brought to bear on navigating the online landscape will continue to defy the imagination. Third and finally, users will continue to demand ever more functionality from this boundless medium.
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One of the amazing phenomena of the last few years is the advent of large-scale, user-generated content sources, such as Wikipedia, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook. These platforms combine the efforts of many individuals (a feat not possible at this scale prior to the Internet), but they are best experienced through a search interface that surfaces the highest-value content. Many start-ups companies now offer a pre-digested or filtered version of Twitter content that attempts to extract meaning from the stream.
We can expect this concept to transform an increasing number of information sources.
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Increasingly, however, search engines will begin to understand more of the intention behind a user's query through the application of better web crawling and mining and natural-language-understanding algorithms. For example, search engines have historically successfully applied complex statistical analyses to the web in several languages to produce translators that handily beat traditional rule-based approaches.
Much More After the Jump
We can expect these efforts to increase in sophistication, ultimately leading to engines that understand both the world and the structure of our language.
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Internet technology moves so rapidly that it's a real challenge to predict the future. However, it seems likely that the exponential growth patterns we are currently enjoying will continue for at least the next 10 to 20 years, which will fundamentally transform the information landscape. Search will be at the center of this transformation because it benefits from scale: It becomes better and more useful as the amount of data increases. It will also be enormously flexible by virtue of being able to understand language in ways that enable it to bridge the gap between physical and virtual worlds. In many ways, search technology is still in its infancy but much like a child, its potential is limitless.
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