The future of search: 2016 and beyond Industry

Things were simpler back in the early days of online search. Or so it was – I wasn’t actually there but I have heard that it was so.

Google’s slogan of “Don’t be evil” actually seemed like something that the company still believed in; ads and sponsored links were much more clearly delineated, and all you needed to do to make your site rank well in search results was to insert a keyword in the right places.

Now things are much more complex, with developments in mobile technology and voice search changing the way that people seek out information. And Google, in spite of all its best efforts, is no longer as central as it would like to be.

So, what are the key trends currently affecting the direction of search?

Walled gardens

A long-standing source of frustration for Google has been the increasing amount of web content that is contained within ‘walled gardens’, sites like Facebook to which people post crucial details about themselves, their lives and loves, all beyond the reach of Google’s grasping, information-hungry hands.

Google wants to know everything it can about you so as to serve you the most dedicated, personalized search results, sometimes before you’ve even searched for something. “They’re not giving a decent result to the user if they don’t include data from these platforms.”

Saying that, Google is also guilty of doing the exact same thing, using its Knowledge Graph function to pull information from websites like Wikipedia onto the search results page, in order to provide the reader with all the facts they need without leaving Google.

In all honesty, the web nowadays is essentially a Battle of the Walled Gardens, with social platforms embedding media such as videos in order to prevent people from leaving the site to watch them; the launch of initiatives like Facebook Instant Articles which serve news articles directly within Facebook; Wikipedia improving its internal search engine to help people find information from its sister projects… the list goes on.

Google in the old days faced very little real competition from its rivals, whose algorithms couldn’t match Google’s for sophistication and accuracy.

While this is still more or less the case, the real threats to Google in 2016 and beyond come from the shifts in online behavior which take information out of reach of its algorithms. One of those shifts is the trend of publishing data to enclosed online spaces instead of web pages; the other is the rise of mobile.

The rise of mobile and voice search

It barely needs reiterating at this point, but internet access on mobile is expanding massively across the world, with the volume of mobile data traffic growing by 74% globally in 2015 alone. As a result, mobile technology increasingly dictates the way that people search for information.

This is another area in which Google has little influence, especially on devices such as the iPhone. While at one time it would have been customary to set your homepage on a desktop browser to Google, things on mobile tend to be much more app-based.

In fact using apps to discover information instead of a browser is an area that’s going to develop even more going forward. I’m skeptical on that front because I can’t really think of any apps I have which would be useful for information finding except for the Google app and the Wikipedia app. But it could be that I’m behind the times.

Of course, the recent launch of Accelerated Mobile Pages is one way that Google hopes to reclaim dominion over the mobile internet space (and expand the reaches of its own walled garden in the process). But Google has another problem which stems from the way people use their mobiles to search.

Voice search and voice commands on mobile are becoming increasingly common as people use digital assistants like Siri and Cortana to perform search queries and carry out tasks.

It’s becoming a lot more common for people to search by talking into their phone, recalling a time when a person walking down the street talking into a hands-free kit would look like they were talking to themselves. Now it’s a common sight.

Google Now lacks the distinctiveness and personality of Apple’s digital assistant, and many Android users will simply look for how to install Siri for Android instead. This increasing humanization of technology and in a particular search could be one of the reasons why people are starting to phrase their search queries differently. For an increasing number of people, search no longer a set of disconnected keywords but a conversation and searches are becoming longer and more specific as a result.