By Stephen Turcotte

A clearer picture of the future of search is developing and, in case you were wondering, that’s great news for search engine marketers.

At the March 2004 Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City, the Walter Cronkite of the search industry, Danny Sullivan, moderated an enlightening session dubbed “Roundtable: The Future of Search”. The panelists included top people from Yahoo!, Google, Ask Jeeves and AOL Search. In attendance were over 570 search engine marketers and major brand marketers from Australia to Madison Avenue. Each of the panelists were asked to provide their opinion where search is heading and how search engine marketing may change.

At this conference the future of search engine marketing started shaping up. The bottom line is that users want information to be accessible, they want more of it, and they want it fast and relevant. Search engines of the future will be personal assistants, butlers, guides and gurus, providing potential answers to our most obscure questions. Search engines of the future will permeate many more aspects of our lives becoming more pervasive, personalized and localized.

For search engine marketers, the key to maintaining prominent listings will be based on a combination of relevance to user queries and ability to pay for the traffic.

Search Pervasiveness

Most of the panelists believed that “access points” to search would grow beyond our desktops suggesting that the next possible venue for search would be our car dashboards and trolley backrests. I’m not crazy about giving drivers more distractions, but the in-car concept is easy to imagine considering the prevalence of OnStar and onboard GPS systems. How hard would it be for a car manufacturer to build a car with Google Inside? The Google Inside mobile could have voice controlled search functionally that searches for results that are pertinent to your current location on a GPS map. I can see my first voice activated search now, “Google Inside, please search for auto body mechanic and personal injury attorney within limping distance.”

Here’s a more sensible prediction – mobile communications device manufacturers bundle voice controlled web searching features into their phones and PDAs. That’s not such big leap either; many of today’s PCS and integrated PDA devices already have voice recognition systems built in. Here are a few other access points we can expect to see search: our kitchen appliances – search for recipe for scallion pancakes, our airplane seats – search for places to go when you arrive at your travel destination, random street corners – do a local area search for a watch repair service.

Localized and Personalized Search

The trend towards personalization is nothing new, but it seems that all the search engines are really starting to roll out services that utilize all the data that they are capturing about us. One of the most thought provoking presentations of the entire conference came from Craig Silverstein of Google when he gave his vision that in 300 years search engines will be more like yeast based search pets that understand our emotions and inferences.

Gerry Cambell, General Manager of AOL Search and Navigation gave a more near future example of inference-based search. He said AOL’s current search learns from their users habits and location and uses that information to provide more relevant search results. “If one of our subscribers searches on ‘pizza,’ our search results will return a list of stores in their ZIP code. In the near future, search results on ‘Eagles’ will be different for a user who visits sports sites and one who goes to classic rock sites.”

At this point a question to consider is how much information should a search engine be allowed to collect about a user before the user’s privacy is violated. Yahoo! Search, for instance, claims to respect users’ privacy by giving the user more control over the results while still extending search to include user intent.

My sentiments on this issue are that I sometimes want the search engine to surprise me with results. Consider going to the library and looking for some particular book on a shelf – you get to check out all kinds of books on the same shelf that you haven’t considered, and which you may find even more interesting than the book you initially searched for. If the search engines of the future know you too well and present more focused search results, these results will only be as good as your search query. Over personalizing search to the point that users are only seeing a narrow page of results would take the adventure and discovery out of search.

Will the Highest Bidder Dominate Search?

Most of the search engine marketing experts I have heard from agree that 2004 is shaping up to be a big year for paid search. And how can you argue with that, a JupiterResearch survey predicts online advertisers will spend 47% of their budgets on search this year, that’s a 21% increase over the 2003 ad spend survey. So, what does that mean for the “natural” search engine marketers? Will search engine positioning become a commodity for the highest advertising bidder to spend directly at the search engine venue, or will there continue to be a great value in optimizing websites for natural search traffic? Well, if some of the major search engines get their way, a substantial portion of the advertising dollars will go directly to them in form of paid placements or sponsored listings. But lets be real – it looks plausible for the short term, but if search engines claim that they will interpret our inferences in the future, then they can’t possibly rely solely on paid programs for relevance. After all, the search engine that has been most popular with the users, Google, has utilized the motto of serving the user and providing relevant results as opposed to serving the companies who are trying to generate traffic, and that is the very reason for its popularity. That means that the search engine advertiser will always get the best ROI from being relevant, and that is great news for all the natural listings search engine marketing companies.

Back to the Future

To summarize my projections for the future of search and search engine marketing, lets start by saying that the evolution of search engines is largely determined by user behavior. As users, we already expect great results from majority of the search engines. It is reasonable that we will expect even better, more relevant, results in the future, and that we will want this search functionality to be more accessible. If search is where the consumer is, more companies will want to improve their presence online. The new trend towards paid search will most likely lead to the highest bidder dominating search results in some cases. On the other hand, if this happens, then it will inevitably make natural or organic search engine results more useful to the end user. Paid search will be harder to get into for medium and small players, and they will turn to natural results. In the end, the search engine that gives the most useful search results will dictate the future of search.