Trend No.1: Intelligent Search
Nowadays popular search engines like google, yandex and even baidu all have one in common: A very minimalistic frontend showing they concentrate on a minimalistic approach of textual input before they start searching.
Why is that? In our opinion because content rich platforms which once were popular and overloaded with news, pictures, ads and a lot more stuff, distract from the user's intention, which is to search... or better to have a particular question to be answered.
You might remember AOL or yahoo once being very successful with content rich websites. Even a lot of today's telco provider's start pages still show additional content, mostly news, on their main page, extended by a search functionality. We think this might raise the users retention on their page to stay longer but is not rewarding in the end.
I do not want to exaggerate, but it's a bit like watching TV instead of focussing on the needs. We think this is also a reason why those portals decrease in popularity. It might even be that the user like to have news displayed. But can the user choose the provider?
So what will be next? Intelligent search will stay smart and get more intelligent. We think that this is a continuous trend. The question is only to what extent this is possible and what will and can be the right way.
We already cann see snippets or recommendation based articles in the search results. Authorship and actuality seems to be concepts on the move to increase relevance. Search is getting more intelligent this way as it is more up to date and reliable.
Trend No.2: Visual Search
However, we believer that intelligent search will be extended by a visual one. A visual approach can offer a broader search experience, an enjoyable search with more love and dedication to use it.A visual search does not have to distract from the user's intention to answer the right question.
So you might wander how that could be possible, will there be more pictures?
Well, first there might not only be pictures, but the experience might change to a third dimension. 3d search can offer a better visual experience. But for sure, pictures are an element to sustain the experience. We like to combine both, a 3d search enriched by visual components. That sounds like a huge goal?
Yes, but we do not want to reinvent the wheel. We currently build our new "experience" on existing technologies and data. We will just make it more haptic and convenient to use.
So to sum it up, we aim to catch the current trends by
- answering the question / intention a user has
- offer an intelligent search the most effective way
- having a 3d search engine using existing content enrichted by pictures
