The Future of Search Engines: Modern Trends & Predictions
In the modern world of Internet technology, IT corporations use different data sources and can obtain a tremendous amount of information about their users. The tech industry is developing faster and faster to provide the best possible results and improve services. It is crucial to keep up with all the updates, yet it might not be that easy. That's why let's recap all the latest search engine trends and the industry's potential future.
Current State
The rapid growth of devices that help you access the Internet “here and now” gave technological giants the ability to track users' actions, locations, and preferences. This also provided search algorithms with much information for analysis.
All this data allows us to detect the relationship between people's intentions and actions. Modern search technologies do not only find those web pages that users are looking for as the answer to their questions. Google successfully uses “predictive search,” thanks to which it is ready to provide any person with the necessary results even before they search for it. Google search engine technologies and AI instruments increase the efficiency even further.
Search mechanisms work as information platforms and intelligent systems, supporting users in resolving issues using any device. Naturally, this goes beyond the usual scanning of the World Wide Web and displaying a simple list of links to web resources. Take, for example, the Bing, released by Microsoft in 1998. Bing Search brings intelligence to search through its integration with the Office suite, the Xbox gaming console, and the Windows operating system.
Google has other development focus. It integrates predictive search tools that allow it to learn a lot of additional information about users. This data helps search engines learn and improve search results in terms of customization. It isn't a secret by now that the same request in the same search engine coming from different people can show different results. That's why your pages can sometimes show up lower in search results just because they are less relevant for a particular person. Yet, this doesn't mean you have to ignore your technical SEO or avoid choosing global and local techniques for your link-building. All these things matter in any case.
Perspectives
Let's take a quick look into the future of search engines and possibilities for business.
For Users
Search engines not only take advantage of the opportunities but also take into account the limitations imposed by mobile devices. After all, a smartphone does not have an extensive search window. Most likely, we will soon see technologies that understand users' intentions not only by their questions but also by touch, gestures, and voice.
Over time, voice search will become more common because it is faster than typing in a text. Voice queries are now predominantly made using mobile devices. Research shows that the topics of such requests mainly relate to the weather, sports matches, the location of nearby objects, and economic news.
Using different cues and conditions (location, context, voice) makes searching more accessible, while maps visualize it. In the future, users can interact with various services and devices in natural language. Thrive My Way can tell how to consider these trends in your promotion strategy.
For Marketers
What does the future of search marketing prepare for the experts in this field? Its developments greatly depend on the available information. With more data and signals to better understand people's intentions, search engines can create better platforms for advertisers. Besides, additional data is what can make marketing more direct and personalized. Of course, this is only beneficial if businesses don't engage in spammy advertising.
By knowing the real intent of their users, search engines can help marketers ensure the accurate targeting of their ads. Internet marketing will become more effective. Companies can better understand their customers, their desires, and their capabilities. It means that we will be able to make more informed decisions to attract a proper audience. This can help marketers in every direction: to create an effective Google Ad, submit quality blog content, and craft the most engaging social media content.
Users in the future will resort to searching for the same purpose as now: to get a high-quality answer to their query. The difference will be that the search time and quality requirements will most likely increase. It is understandable since the goals of a search engine are to help users resolve their issues more efficiently and as quickly as possible to achieve the best results.
Possible Improvements
The search engine of the future should make it as easy as possible for the user to formulate a query based on statistical data:
- Correct grammatical errors and typos (according to statistics, approximately 15% of words in search queries contain errors).
- Fix typing a search query on a different keyboard layout.
- Understand the syntax of the language queries in natural language (for example, the search query “goats” is a surname, not an animal).
- Understand transliterated words.
- Recognize complex words typed together.
- Warn about malware on websites.
The listed “tricks” have already been implemented in leading search engines. Now, it's only a matter of improvement that can bring usability to the next level.
Conclusion
Let's summarize: search engines of the future will be multi-resulting (search results: text, images, audio, video, news, reference information, services, and advertising), personalized (adjusting to the user's interests and their location), semantic (understand the meaning of the request), relevant (take into account news events), independent of SEO pressure. The search engine of the future is a search and reference system. There is a clear trend toward a gradual shift away from the “static web.” Instead, in our mobile age, the “momentary web” is becoming important, as people tend to search through the latest posts and notes.