What You Should Know about Integrated Search - AOL, A9, and Google 3.0

We have come full circle with search (not for the first time). Early search engines were more like file indexers and if you were able to submit data at all about your Web site you could only provide a few “tags.” Even directories tended to provide better results than those early services, but we have long since become accustomed to tagging posts in social media sites.

Now AOL, A9 (Amazon), and Google have brought search technology forward into integrated search. Over the past few years search indexes have become fragmented. We have Web Search, Blog Search, Local Search, News Search, Image Search, Video Search, and now even Book Search. Search engine interfaces have become increasingly complex as they’ve added more tabs and vertical search structures.

But the user navigation experience is far from ideal when you have to jump from vertical to vertical. Earlier this year America Online introduced its FullView integrated search interface. Not long ago Amazon unrolled the new A9 integrated search interface. It should probably have come as no surprise that we would see real innovation among the syndicated search partners (AOL uses Google’s database and A9 uses Microsoft’s).

Yahoo! and Microsoft both claim they have been integrating search results for some time now, but they require the user to configure their search interfaces. A9 allows extensive user customization but it doesn’t require customization in order for users to enjoy integrated search.

AOL and A9 together capture less than 5% of search query share, so the majority of searchers have not yet been exposed to integrated search functions. Now Google has unveiled what some are calling Google 3.0, or the Searchology Update.

Google says it has completely redesigned its search engine from the ground up: the internal data management functions are different, the crawling functions are different, the indexing functions are different. And now people are wondering how this affects their search marketing and visibility.

Some search marketing consultants are playing the Fear, Uncertainty, and Dismay card in the hope of attracting new business. “Your SEO is not prepared for this new world of search. We are.” “Your competitors have been caught flat-footed by Google 3.0. We’ll help you seize the day.”

The monumental task of pulling data from up to seven search indexes in response to a single query is further complicated by the search engines’ desire to maintain their standards of quality and relevance. In some cases, search engines sacrifice quality for the sake of relevance, and in some cases they sacrifice relevance for the sake of quality. But though we have seen new user interfaces, there is no indication that the rules have changed.

That is, the standards by which the search engines judge the Web are the same as they were before they had their latest face lifts. Nonetheless, the movement toward integrated search does change the playing field somewhat.

For the several years prior to integrated search the engines have divided content on the Web into vertical indexes that reflect technologies, but this division of data is somewhat artificial. News stories, for example, are still published through standard HTML pages. So are blog posts. What distinguishes news and blog content from traditional Web content, however, are the qualities of timeliness and temporal relevance. That is, their content often becomes less useful as more time passes, as more new stories and posts are created.

Image and video content convey information in a substantially different medium. The technology to extract information from audio and graphical content is only just now emerging, and in some respects has yet to be deployed. But we have learned (both Web site operators and search engineers) to surround audio-visual content with relevant identifying information. We encapsulate our audio-visual content with indexable content. There is a convergence of technologies that has made integration more feasible.

The benefit of integration is that we can begin to look at information less as “Web documents,” “graphical files,” and “audio files” and more simply as “blocks of information” or information sources. The mode of presentation is less meaningful for search. Medium has begun to assume a significant transparency.

As we learn to embed relevance-influencing content in non-traditional media we’ll capture more searchers through a broader reach. But we’ll also find ourselves competing on more fronts. The normalization of presentation media in Web search is comparable to accelerating the introduction of competitive content by new publishers. Yesterday we had to be more relevant than 100 million documents. Today we have to be more relevant than 150 million information sources.

As the indexed, visible Web has grown, we have found ourselves faced with increasing competition anyway. We are largely already tooled up, trained, and deployed to take on a greater number of competitors for searcher attention. And that is why we should not be afraid of integrated search.

As the search engines evaluate their users’ experience they will make adjustments in both their presentation strategies and their indexing algorithms. But the indexing process can still be influenced by the meta information we provide with each information source. The type of source should become increasingly irrelevant and transparent to the average searcher.

That is not to say that vertical search indexes will become useless. On the contrary, I see a growing need for archival searches across timely content: news, Blogs, and even videos and images. As the search engines improve their ability to capture and catalogue temporal data we’ll find ourselves conducting more research into trends and patterns.

The structure of queries should evolve and grow just as the structure of Web content and of the indexes we rely upon to find that content have evolved and grown. I don’t think there is any reason to be concerned. If anything, we now have an opportunity to improve our visibility and reach across integrated search results by creating more useful, informative, and innovative content.