Search hasn’t changed much in the past 10 years – type in a brief query and the top search engines serve up too many matches but no insight.

At this week’s SMXWest, a conference where search engine marketing professionals learn how to get their client’s Web site to the top of the pile, there were a few hints about how the user experience might change.

Flashing images of old cartoon characters on the wall, keynote speaker Louis Monier, Ph.D., vice president of products for stealth start-up Cuill (pronounced “cool�) of Menlo Park, Calif. described the current, passive user experience as, “We’re the Flintstones and we want to be the Jetsons. We’ve been using search engines the same way for the past 10 years.�

As the inventor of AltaVista, the pioneer of search engines a decade ago, Monier’s words hung heavy in the packed auditorium. Meanwhile Cuill’s user-agent Twiceler crawls Web sites so much these days there’s speculation that its first product launch is not far off. Monier, who once led the design of a faceted search engine for Google, declined to reveal anything about Cuill. But his complaints the dearth of search engine innovation to improve the users’ experiences hints at what’s to come.

Google is optimized for the I’m Feeling Lucky button. Few users bother to use advanced search functions, which are still a far cry from the type of search one could do on Lexis Nexus or other tools familiar to librarians and other researchers.

“Most users are afraid of advance search,� claims Phil McDonnel, a software engineer for Google Inc.

Google advocates “personalized� search, which is a way of putting a positive spin on Google’s practice of keeping records of all the search terms, Web pages, and even the amount of time you spend on the Internet so it builds a profile about your supposed interests and behavior in order to serve up the pages it assumes you want to see. (This is a function you can opt out of but few users realize they can.)

One of Monier’s chief complaints about today’s search engines is that there is no guidance about what’s the best way to phrase a query to get the best results. Search engines assume the first few results will satisfy users. Most electronic commerce sites don’t make the same assumption. If you’re searching for shoes to buy you’re able to sort and filter information about price, size, style, color, manufacturer, and assorted other parameters. Most of today’s general search engines – Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo!, and Ask – don’t help users much to sort and filter results. Clusty is one that groups results by topics to make going through hundreds of pages a little easier.

Monier sees shortcomings with the various new approaches: blended, social, semantic, and vertical searches as well as structured data and natural language. None get to the heart what people need when searching the vast library of online information – access to everything on the Web (not just the most popular pages) and an easy way to cull the relevant from the irrelevant.

“I don’t think 10 years from now we’ll be typing in two words and getting thousands of pages,� he said. Instead he envisions a search engine being able to do queries, analyze sources, organize by topics, and filter results by other user-designated parameters much like a research assistant would.

With search offering the highest advertising monetization on the Internet (today roughly $100 to $120 cost per thousand page impressions), let’s hope that Cuill, Blekko, Inc. of Redwood Shores, or one of the other search engine companies in stealth mode will be able to deliver more than a mountain of pages to click through.
Mary AC Fallon, editor, http://www.demo.com