WildBlueSkies - Trends and strategies in Digital Media

To try and predict what the future of search would be, lets take a step back.
Time was when the race for the best search engine was one that managed to index as much of the Internet as possible. The popularity of the keyword on a page is what determined how high that page came up in the results. However, as the information highway started clogging up, the race moved to one that would give the most contextually relevant results. Ask Jeeves was the first to experiment with human powered search - their model involved human agents who would chat with the searchers, understand their requirements and point them to the right source. This however, was hampered by rather obvious scalability issues, and Ask Jeeves soon had to become Ask.com. Google’s PageRank evolved as the best option for relevance.
A number of companies tried - for instance there’s Kartoo. A search engine giving its results in a Flash interface, Kartoo draws relationships between its results which it draws from querying other search engines, and presents the results as a visual categorization. While Kartoo presents it as a visual map, Clusty groups similar results into clusters and presents them in a normal text interface.
There was also Teoma (later bought over by Ask). Teoma’s technology (Subject-Specific Popularity) analyzed links in context to rank a web page’s importance within its specific subject. For instance, a web page about ‘baseball’ would rank higher if other web pages about ‘baseball’ link to it.
Given the explosion of content on the internet, providing relevant search results is becoming all the more imperative, and search engines like Hakia are promising technology to match the human brain’s cognitive skills to interpret meaning rather than by the occurrence (or popularity) of search terms. Similarly, Powerset is building a search engine based on natural language processing.
Others like Mahalo and the soon-to-be-expected Search Wikia plan to rely on volunteers to provide pre-sorted results, and hence enhance results.
Most search engines however still rely more on the explicit meaning of a phrase, and not necessarily the implicit  - who would be the first to get there? Given the different media we now interact with, how would each of these models translate into a different media, say, the mobile phone?

Related reads:
Wikia buys Grub - plans a head-on against Google
Are Google’s days numbered?
The Search Engine page on Wikipedia gives a timeline
A list of Search Engines

Filed under: Digital culture, Ideas & Innovations, Trends