Where should Google draw the line between satisfying your search query itself, and pointing you towards some other website that can satisfy your query?
The answer to that question could have a big impact on the bottom line of many publishers around the Web.
This issue was raised by some of the new search features that Google showed off at an event at its Mountain View headquarters on Tuesday (some of which are shown here.)
Take a highly ambitious experimental idea known as Google Squared (partial screen shot at the top of this post.) This is the results page returned for the query “small dogs” – Google extracts information from multiple websites, works out common values (breed name, weight, height) and presents the results in a spreadsheet format.
For many online publishers, this future will look scary. It implies that for some types of information Google will become a destination site, not intermediary.
Asked about that, Marissa Mayer, head of search products, was quick to say that Google adds citations to all the “source” websites, so the service could become a source of traffic for other online publishers. But she also had this to say about Google Squared: “We really like the way that the information ultimately produces more for the user than the original Web page did.” For publishers on the Web, that’s scary.
This future is still a long way off. Like WolframAlpha, a “question and answer” service due to debut next week, it is still at a highly experimental stage. Yet the long-term implications are huge: like the Semantic Web, these services point to a time when online services like Google draw on a network of linked data, rather than just a network of linked documents. At that point, users should be able to query the data without ever needing to visit the underlying sources – at least in theory.
At that point, life will be much easier for internet users. But it will require a new business model for the Web. Otherwise, the sites that act as the source documents for much of that data will gather dust like so many worthy books in an unvisited library.
Incidentally, Google’s search event on Tuesday also showcased some new search features with more immediate relevance. Google Search Options, a new panel that will appear in the left hand column of search results, will give users tools to refine their own search results – for instance, based on chronology.
Coming two years after Universal Search (which Google says is now used in a quarter of its search results pages) this looks like an admission of the limits of technology: a search engine cannot anticipate user intent in all circumstances, sometimes searchers need more tools to find their own way to the right answer.
