Beyond Google: The Next Generation of Search

By Danesh Omrani

August 25, 2003

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For most people, the Internet has become the number one source for seeking information. Search engines have found their way into our everyday lives. Visit any web site from popular consumer sites like Yahoo, eBay and Amazon, through to corporate Intranets and even small e-commerce sites, and you will soon find the ubiquitous search box. But let's face it, finding information on the Web is getting harder by the day and it may be that the existing generation of search tools are failing to keep pace. What's more, the situation is going to get even worse! Judging by the amount of time that people spend on searching for information at their workplaces, it appears that we could soon be approaching a crisis. It is estimated that by 2005 the volume of digital data will double every three months, and search engines will at best only reach 50 percent of the total available web pages. According to research conducted by market research firms Outsell and Delphi, office employees now spend on average 30 percent of their time looking for, collecting, and analyzing information. This works out at around $30,000 per knowledge worker per year (assuming an average cost per employee of $100,000). Out of this time nearly two thirds is spent on the Internet, at an average cost of $20,000 per worker per year.

At the user's end, the range and skill of the population also vary greatly. We have at one end the specialist searchers who know precisely what they seek and most of the time know where to look, while at the other end are the mass of web surfers who barely know how to search and are mostly content to enter couple of keywords, hit go and pray for the best.

Optimists amongst us would say that all of these are problems of success, and point to household names like Yahoo and the venerable Google as the symbols of this success. It is true, of course, that the search market is worth $2 billion a year and is perhaps one bright spot amid the otherwise gloomy IT market place. This market is still growing and a multitude of researchers and vendors are actively engaged in developing new solutions to address some of the issues outlined above.

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