SEL: Search Engine Watch's Chris Sherman Shares Views on Search Industry

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Search marketing in the new media era.

July 15, 2004

Search Engine Watch's Chris Sherman Shares Views on Search Industry

Over the next few days, in celebration of SEL's 1st birthday, we're going to publish a series on the search engine industry. We asked some of the most noted search engine experts to give theirs answers to two questions:

Q1. What search engine industry development/announcement has surprised you the most in the past 12 months?
Q2. What do you think will be the most significant development in the next 12 months?

Today, we feature the responses from Search Engine Watch's assistant editor and "nice-guy" of search, Chris Sherman.

Q1. What search engine industry development/announcement has surprised you the most in the past 12 months?

Yahoo's abandonment of the AltaVista, AlltheWeb and Inktomi technologies, replacing them with the new Yahoo Search Technology platform. In hindsight, this development made perfect sense, given the amount of time it took them to roll out the new system after the acquisitions. It also made sense for them to develop a new search engine from scratch, rather than bolting together older technologies, to better compete with Google.

Q2. What do you think will be the most significant development in the next 12 months?

I think we're going to see major improvements in three areas from the "big three" over the next year: Personalization, local search, and true (finally) natural language search capabilities. We've already seen the
first moves in all three of these areas, but I think we're in for some dramatic improvements, and I'm really looking forward to watching the next 12 months unfold. I'm far less optimistic about another trend that's been
hyped a lot lately: integrated desktop/web search. Despite the hoopla, this isn't new, and just about everyone that's tried it has failed to make it work (Enfish, Kenjin, AltaVista, Inktomi... the list goes on and on). Blending web search (unstructured data) with desktop search (semi-structured and structured data) is like mixing oil and water. About the only company I've seen that's close to doing it properly is FAST, but that's on an enterprise level, not on a personal computer level. Color me skeptical.

Would you like to share your answers to the two questions? Send me an email and I'll post the most interesting responses.

Andy Beal | permalink | +marktd |

...the search industry queries new media