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This year marks the coming of age for search, and as it passes,
a plethora of new search opportunities will come about. In this three-part
special report, the E-Commerce Times explores how the search industry
is evolving, who the winners and losers will be, and what new developments
are in store for users.
The search engine industry is constantly evolving. It seems like every
other week there is news of a new announcement -- the latest innovation
in search that is sure to be copied within months, or a legal issue
that threatens to change the landscape.
Search has transitioned from a simplistic entry point to King Content
to a more interactive arena that's beginning to define the information
landscape and how we relate to it.
Many credit Google with starting the revolution, but experts predict
2005 will see the search industry take it to the next level with the
birth of niche engines, metadata breakthroughs and intelligent technologies
that make search easier for the end user.
Search Engine Marketing
Last year saw DoubleClick buy out Performics, Ask Jeeves scoop up Excite,
and Real Media acquire Decide Interactive. Some analysts predict additional
market consolidation and strategic acquisitions in the search industry
this year and say search engine marketing firms will be the next big
target.
Indeed, now that businesses are are aware of the comparative benefits
and advantages of search engines over radio, TV or print, search engine
marketing is becoming vogue once again. That is causing a dilemma for
smaller advertisers and an opportunity for smaller search engines.
Because there is a limited supply of ads and advertising space on the
leading engines, the increasing demand is driving up prices, according
to Steve Latham, CEO of Spur Digital, an online marketing strategy firm.
"I think it's inevitable that other engines will gain popularity,"
Latham said. "Technology users tend to distrust the vendor that
has too much power, and Google could become the next Microsoft in this
respect. We just need more people to start using kanoodle, business.com,
Ask Jeeves and other niche search engines."
Birth of Niche Engines
Experts said rising paid-search prices is one of the reasons why niche
search engines are beginning to gain some momentum. Patricia Hursh,
founder and president of SmartSearch Marketing, predicts that in an
effort to prevent the migration from leading engines to smaller, up-and-coming
players, ad networks will simplify the ad campaign set-up and management
process.
Hursh told the E-Commerce Times that this will allow more small, local
and novice advertisers to get involved, but niche engines are still
bound to gain ground in 2005. "It's easier to find a needle in
a smaller haystack," Hursh said. "The challenge here is raising
market awareness and changing consumer behavior."
Andy Beal, vice president of search marketing for WebSourced, a search
engine marketing firm, told the E-Commerce Times that highly targeted
search engines catering to niche markets will become visible this year.
These focused engines will not compete with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft,
he noted.
"Niche engines will work alongside the [leading] engines and provide
Internet users with topical information," Beal said. "Expect
taglines such as 'the Google of travel search' and 'the Google of childcare
search' to flood the marketplace."
Make Way for Metadata
The phenomenal success of Google's search technology has put pressure
on Web sites of all kinds to improve search capabilities. The science
of search, once a digital version of hide-and-seek, now includes topic
maps, a standards-based way to associate metadata to electronic content
and define relationships between the information components based on
ideas rather than simple keywords.
"Right now even the best search engines are accessing [only] a
small fraction of the information out there. It's like reading the book
but missing every third page," said Martin Korsin, vice president
of business solutions at Innodata Isogen, a content supply chain solutions
provider.
"There are vast sources of information that are untagged and unmarked
just waiting to be found. Up until now, many organizations did not see
commercial value in making all of their content available. That is changing,"
Korsin said.
Analysts said there are knowledge management standards being developed
-- like RDF and XML topic maps -- designed to allow people to pull together
knowledge that is not explicitly linked. Searchers can create a topic
map that enables the use of the content in ways not predetermined by
its creator instead catering to the needs of the information consumer.
For example, a search for "women wearing pants" on most major
search engines will bring up a wide variety of results, most of which
are useless to a graduate student doing a thesis on the cultural history
of women wearing pants. Topic maps can capture an expert's knowledge
of the nature of electronic information and the relationship to other
information components, creating complex maps that overlay the information
and enable powerful targeted searching.
"Wouldn't it be wonderful if your search for an author provided
categorized search results, with information on the author and on other
authors who wrote about the book you were researching, providing insight
into what those authors were thinking?" Korsin asked. "This
is where search is going, and publishers in many ways are ahead of Google
in this respect."
Ask Jeeves, But Send Watson
Companies like Intellext are leading the way toward a new trend in search
that seeks to remove the yoke from the searcher's shoulders by reading
and understanding what they are working on and using that knowledge
to proactively find and deliver useful information.
Intellext has named its newborn technology "Watson," and its
assignment is to find information the user didn't know existed in places
they otherwise might not have looked.
"The days in which manually typing terms into a search box was
the only way to find information are over," Intellext CEO Al Wasserberger
said. "While this method will continue to be important, we're now
at a pivotal point in the evolution of how people interact with information."
Watson determines what information is relevant to each user, and forms
contextually based queries rather than simple one- or two-word search
terms to generate a set of results. Watson automatically brings users
any relevant information from their company's external and internal
information sources.
As 2005 continues, there will be many new developments, technologies
and ideas in the world of search as the war of wars continues. With
e-commerce making a full comeback during the 2004 shopping season, experts
said search is more important than ever, and they expect to see things
that no one has even predicted in tech news headlines in the coming
months.
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