Assuming you were stocking a time capsule, you wouldn't be able to find a much more telling image of 21st-century life than a typical page of search results. The blue link, the green address, the text in between, the boxes above and on the right-hand side - these are cultural artefacts that are, you might imagine, burned permanently on to our eyeballs.
But as ubiquitous as search now is, as dominant as Google has proved itself to be in many territories, search has been trying hard to push beyond its boundaries once again. As a result, 2008 has been arguably one of the most eventful years the search marketing industry has ever seen.
Google, inevitably the lead character in the search drama, changed the script in May by scrapping its keyword-bidding policy. In early September, it moved to challenge Microsoft with its new Chrome browser.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has tried and failed to swallow Yahoo!, while Cuil, a rare new search engine launched by a team largely built of Google dissidents, arrived on the scene in July, prompting many to speculate, perhaps a little prematurely, that Google's dominance could be under threat.
And, all the while, universal, local and mobile search have bustled in the wings, waiting for their moment, along with social media and other user-generated search results. Because as significant as 2008 has been for search, it seems increasingly inevitable that the next two years are going to be when the real changes take place.
Visions of local search on the move, via mobile and other devices, are tantalisingly close to fruition, enhanced by the enormous uptake of such services in the Far East. The iconic image of the web search page may not be under threat from such quarters, but it will find itself, sooner rather than later, with an equally ubiquitous pocket-sized cousin.
Burning issue
The face of traditional internet search is also changing. The concept of universal search, taking account of the increasing amounts of video and other material now to be found online, is another burning issue in deep-thinking search circles.
As search engines change and mobile becomes more prominent, the way companies appear in results pages and buy advertising is also going to change. Brands' strategy will have to adapt to new trends in search marketing.
Universal, local and mobile are the pillars that, unless an entire industry is very much mistaken, will support the search experience of the future. Google knows it, as do rivals such as Cuil, which is aiming to challenge on the universal search front by creating its own index and its own look.
"A lot of people have criticised Cuil for the way it lays out search results, but it is just laying them out differently, and that shouldn't necessarily be seen as a bad thing," says Jamie Riddell, director of innovation at Cheeze. "It still needs some work, but the fact that it is a new index is refreshing, because we haven't had one for a while."
Cuil could be, if not the search window of the future, than at least a step in that direction. Needless to say, Google is taking its own steps too, but the layout of universal search results is only one part of the picture. The technological challenge of breaking down the barriers between vertical searches to create a universal search, is currently keeping the top brains at Googleplex hard at work. The challenge is to determine what medium of information people are looking for when they type a few search words.
To that end, at the recent Search Engine Strategies event in San Jose, the biggest buzz concerned the fundamental issue of meaning, according to Mel Carson, adCenter community manager, Microsoft Europe.
A matter of meaning
"It was all about: what is the actual meaning of the query that this user is typing into that search box?" says Carson. "What are they looking for and why are they looking for it?"
The key is in a search provider's ability to delve into semantics, rather than taking its cues from keywords in their basic, ambiguous state. Natural language search pioneers such as Powerset, which was acquired in July by Microsoft, aim to create engines that can understand the internet, rather than simply scanning its text for matches and other evidence of relevance.
"For the past ten years, we have just been looking at ten blue links, ranked in accordance with keywords and link popularity," says Carson. "With the emergence of universal or blended search, we are all starting to move towards a richer and more vivid search experience."
A quantum shift in richness and vividness by 2010, powered by breakthroughs in semantic understanding, would be a worthwhile thing to hope for, particularly given that, by Microsoft's calculations, 40 per cent of search queries currently go unanswered. "There is plenty of room for improvement," says Carson. "But 18 months to two years is a long time."
The influence of web 2.0 on search is also sure to be felt in the rise of personalised search employing user-generated results. Google has reputedly been experimenting with a Digg-style interface allowing users to vote results up or down.
Likewise, the power of Facebook and its advertising tie-up with Microsoft has yet to be exploited. Social networking, while not a branch of search as such, is certainly a competitor to its monopoly on the discovery of online information.
"Twitter and the rest are not just conversational tools but recommendation engines," says Riddell. "When I'm searching for information or products, I ask my Twitter peers first before using a traditional search engine and I think that trend will continue into the mainstream through the next two years."
New search hardware
One way or another, we can expect to be finding more of what we are looking for in the coming years. The exact circumstances under which we go about searching are another question again.
Each year, for the past five or six years at least, the standard anti-climax has been mobile's failure to develop into the medium it seems destined to be. And yet intelligent tipsters are sticking to their predictions, knowing that the tipping point, so to speak, can't be far away.
"There is so much infrastructure in place, and so much software in place and being developed, especially from a search point of view, that I think by 2010 we will see a very significant use of that platform, driven by local search," says Gavin Ailes, deputy managing director of The Search Works.
What is missing in the UK, and what inevitably must arrive if this vision of 2010 is to be realised, is geo-targeting technology robust enough to sit on top of the mapping and directory data and give life to genuine local search via mobile.
"In Japan, 30 per cent of page impressions are generated by mobile handsets," says Ailes. "That is a market that has got to where we want to be, so it is reasonable to assume we can catch up, and I think 2010 is a pretty reasonable timescale for that."
Ironically enough, the major obstacle in the path of local search is neither the technology, nor any lack of will on the part of those who would provide the service, but the factor many might imagine to be the easy part: the local information itself.
"The key to search isn't actually search-engine technology, because the search providers have mastered that, though clearly it is always improving," says Steve Barnes, chief executive of local search marketing specialist Infoserve. "The key is getting the right information, getting timely and accurate information and getting it on there."
The theory is simple: invite SMEs to come online and volunteer information about themselves, their products and services.
"The problem," says Barnes, "is that they don't do it, so you have to go out and get the information."
The scale of that task notwithstanding, the impact of the iPhone will have truly registered by the time of 2010, Apple having introduced us to the model for the first generation of truly mass-market convergence devices.
"The success of the iPhone will be followed up with a similar search function on the Nokia N96," says Riddell. "That small application, I believe, will be the kick-start of a new generation of mobile searching."
Mobile PCs
There are those who believe descendents of the iPhone will be operating as de facto personal computers within two years, rendering the term mobile more or less redundant.
"The iPhone will be your computer and, as you sit in your office, you will have some sort of docking station, a monitor and perhaps a hard drive to back it up," says Barnes.
According to Andy Atkins-Kruger, managing director of multilingual natural search operation WebCertain, this next step has huge implications for corporate control of search.
"When you get to the stage where you have a laptop connected to the internet via a mobile-phone company, boy, that is an interesting development," he says. "Who is in charge then?"
Well, indeed, who will be in charge in 2010? Many in the industry are unequivocal, and for all the search-watchers who hold Google to be unassailable, at least in the medium term, the only feasible check to the search giant's growth will come from watchful authorities, rather than a rampant rival.
"Google's biggest competitor over the next few years, depending on how big they get and how fast they grow, will be the regulators in the US and Western Europe," says Kevin Ryan, global content director of US-based search authority Search Engine Watch. "There is no Google Killer (among its rivals); bureaucracy and government are the only things that can kill Google."
This may well prove to be true. However, Atkins-Kruger has another theory - one that requires a shift in perspective. He points to a Financial Times survey he analysed in his Multilingual Search blog in a self-explanatory post called: 'China Mobile - a bigger internet player than Google globally? Discuss.'
Ranking the world's key internet companies according to their market capitalisation, the survey placed Google in 12th on $104bn. Up ahead are several hardware and software giants, including Microsoft ($264bn), IBM ($159bn), Cisco ($144bn) and Apple ($126bn). The real monster on the list is Hong Kong-based China Mobile, which, with a market cap of $298bn, is the largest of nine telcos in the top 20, ahead of third-placed AT&T ($231bn), fifth-ranked Vodafone ($159bn) and tenth-placed Nokia ($120bn).
Battleground
"If you change the lens, change the way you are looking at the internet, and you include those mobile phone companies, then you have got a completely different picture of what is going on in the world, with Apple and Nokia bigger and more powerful than Google," says Atkins-Kruger. "These companies are all fighting for revenue in this space, and that is where I see the battleground opening up in the future."
In economic times such as these, it is worth considering that growth, however accustomed, can't necessarily be taken for granted, and the same applies to search. However, Ryan believes the underlying numbers will be good enough.
"Over the next couple of years, paid search is going to continue to grow in the developed countries at a predictable and reasonable rate," says Ryan. "But we are not going to see the 200% year-on-year growth we saw in the 2002-2005 period."
If growth is measured in revenues, that is very likely to be the case. But if we measure growth in terms of progress, the next two years could be explosive ones indeed.
Snapshot of search in 2010
Crunching together the possibilities, the door is open for a mighty new search player to come from the East, bringing with it a multi-lingual platform that employs a semantic algorithm to supply inch-perfect, locally relevant universal search results to the wireless device of your choice. It's unlikely, but it's possible.
More likely, Google will remain our dominant player and its results will improve without our knowing quite why - no one knows the recipe for its algorithm now, so why would we know it in 2010? It seems inevitable that the presentation of results will continue to evolve, in recognition of the changing constituents of the web, to reach deeper into video and user-generated results.
The most significant change in all of this is almost certain to be the kind of devices we use to conduct our searches and the collapse of the barrier between the mobile and computer-bound internet. The concept of mobile search has been straining at the gate for too long to be contained for much longer.
SMART THINK!NG - SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING
1. Don't think only in terms of text. Hitwise indicates that 29 per cent of online videos are found through search, up from 22 per cent last year
2. Maximise your engagement with mobile and local search engines. Sooner or later, mobile searchers will come looking for you - make sure you're there to be found
3. Keep watching the social networks. Because the engagement they offer is one of the web's most potent forces
4. Be prepared for anything. Today's search optimisation is based on relevance, recency and keywords. All it takes is the small matter of a quantum leap in semantic methods of search and all bets are off.