Beyond algorithms and the future of search at SXSW

"Beyond Algorithms: search and the semantic web" featured some heavy hitters in the search world talking about the future of search, including:

• Will Hunsinger, CEO of Evri and because of the recent aquisition, Twine
• Carla Thompson, Senior Analyst for the Guidewire Group
• Barak Berkowitz, Managing Director of Wolfram Alpha
• Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land
• Nova Spivak, Founder of Twine and now LiveMatrix.com
• Dag Kittlaus, Co-Founder and CEO of Siri
• Barney Pell from Bing
• Gil Elbaz, Founder of Factual.com

With a heated start to the discussion over the usefulness of the word "semantic", the most interesting statement was made by Dag Kittlaus, saying his time in the Valley has revealed a surprising lack of creativity around the search topic.

Here are some of the more interesting parts of the rest of the conversation...

Talking about the future of user interface around search Carla loved Siri's concept, which I covered earlier this year. Barak mentioned that map based search data was a huge change in search UI but it's only possible to do that with certain types of data.

Most agreed that the future involved a combination of personalization and more relevant data. Most interesting were Bing's experiments with long running search sessions. Barney described a standard search a user might do when booking a trip, with the user currently being required to go back and forth from the search engine and relevant sites with the engine keeping no context of previous searches. He said, "We're heading to situations where systems can 'get' you."

When asked if there was room for new search players the panel consensus was that mashups using the abundance of new APIs will provide really interesting new ways to search.

The concept of personalization popped up again in the questions with the panel agreeing it was the future of making search better. Interesting side note, Danny mentioned that all search on Google, even if you don't login, is personalized as of December 2009.

In summary, going forward the big things in search will be; personalization, long running searches and different ways to visualize and deliver results. Oh, and there's room for innovation, new ideas and competition.

Tags: Bing, evri, search, semantic web, SemanticWeb, SIRI, sxsw, twine, wolframalpha