Tim Mayer is the former head of search product and business at Yahoo.
The Future of Search
- Traditional Search – You enter a query and get back a result.
- Predictive Search – Search engines are able to connect your check-in history, personal profiles, and that of your friends to make recommendations for other plausible actions and transactions.
5 Key Trends That Will Influence Search
- Growth of mobile queries. By 2012, mobile queries will make up 1 in 5 searches. The largest categories of mobile search right now are informational, local, and product lookup.
- Growth in apps, not browsers. The majority of the time people spend on the phone, browser accounts for 50% of face time. Just a couple of years ago, browsers were taking 70-80% of the face time. We’re seeing a strong migration to apps.
- Input is difficult. We’re going to have to find more ways to integrate our personal data “inputs” from the past to impact current searches.
- More context. With the increase in local, more results will be returned in the context of location.
- “Verticalizing” SERPs. People are starting to go directly to brand sites, i.e. Amazon, etc. to search, and less to search engines. Look to search engines to start integrating more of these results.
Opportunities for service providers
App discovery is the key to customer satisfaction in the smart phone era. Right now, it’s difficult for people to identify which apps are really the best and most effective for accomplishing their goals.
There’s a huge opportunity for technology to bridge the gap between apps and search boxes. In the future, we may see aggregators that determine which is truly the best search tool to use when you perform a search, be it app or HTML site, and automatically use those to return results, depending on the query and context.
Opportunities for publishers
Mobile advertising demand is not increasing at a very fast rate, so prices are still fairly slow. There’s an opportunity for
First mover app in a new category on new platform. Epicurious became the default recipe app for the iPad. There are other opportunities to capitalize on existing trends in new platforms.
I think mobile devices are too small and fiddly to be fully use for search, even the ipad isn’t the best option.
David.
Mobile searches are definetly on the rise. I know my family uses them ALL them time to find restaurants, movies, phone numbers and more. They are very relavent to retail searches and I personally believe that 1 in 5 is going to be a low esitmate for 2012.
It would definitely be better if they could add in all the searches from within 50 feet of the searcher’s location within the past 30 days. That way, if someone is (for instance) standing at the sears tower, and have no idea where to eat, they can search for “most searched restaurants” and it pulls it up, instead of pulling up the one paying the most for PPC rank, or with the best SEO company.
Mobile internet will be the new haven for advertisements, for leads.