If you want to know about something, go to the source. If you want to know about search, your best bet would be go to some of the biggest innovators in search engine’s relatively brief history.

Chris Sherman of SearchEngineLand managed to bring together a host of very clever search specialists, including Yahoo!’s VP of search experience and the product manager for Microsoft Live search. He wanted to know what the future of search would look like, here is what he found out.

What Will The Search Page Look Like?


Marissa Mayer: I think it will be, hopefully, a layout that’s a little bit less linear and text based, even than our search results today and ultimately use what I call the ‘sea of whiteness’ more in the middle of the page, and lays out in a more information dense way all the information from videos to audio reels to text, and so on and so forth. So if you imagine the results page, instead of being long and linear, and having ten results on the page that you can scroll through to having ten very heterogeneous results, where we show each of those results in a form that really suits their medium, and in a more condensed format.

Search Engines As Portals?

Larry Cornett: I think one place that you’ve seen us doing a bit of that is with what we call our WOW experiences. And so we launched a few of the movies, it’s like a direct display; it’s a really rich direct display on the search page. We’ve launched movies; we recently launched travel and, most recently music, so music artists. And essentially that’s bringing a lot of very useful information from different sources together in one place.

Web 2.0 Roundup

There was a lot of really interesting information presented here. If you are at all interested in search and its future, I suggest giving it a look. My opinions on search is that once all of our information has been aggregated, the next big step in search will be to disaggregate that information into palatable chunks.

The next great search engine will be the one that can present information in a way that makes people actually want to consume it.