Future Changes In The Search Engine Results Pages

[morestar]

Good day! I've been thinking about this for some time; the future changes in the search engine results pages. The thought came about after a search I did that I knew needed to show me results from forums. Why? Well the particular search I did was related to a web development question and from my experience most of the answers are found in either forums or blog articles.

So what's the future of the search results pages? As it stands, the major search engines are compacting more and more information into their search results pages. Recently Google added real time search results, live tweets from Twitter, hot news articles and the like - we see images for image results, videos for video results and Google map results.

Will the future of the search results pages be organized based on website type?

The following is what I'm alluding to - for instance for a search on php date script we could find the search results displaying the following:

*--- sponsored results ---*
Recent Historical Results
Forum Results
Blog Results
Article Results
News Results
Video Results (tutorials)
Online Store Results (purchase scripts)
*--- pagination ---*

Then the user could click on one of the above titles and the associated search results could then dynamically be displayed or even dynamically be searched again and bring results.

With respect to my search for the php script I would definitely click on the Forum Results (which then would dynamically display new results from forums).

In my opinion, breaking down a user's search results into clear categories cleans up the search results pages helps find the information I'm looking for in places that I would safely assume I would find it.

Have you had some ideas sitting in the back of your mind with respect to different ways the search engine results pages can be enhanced or will be in the future?

I'm in no way asking Google to change the way they display their search results but I strongly believe the major search engines are always changing, always looking for ways to enhance the user experience and bring to the user exactly what they are searching for in the least amount of time - without having to always sift through the rift-raft.



;)

[kgun]

A natural distiction is between supervised learning classification, clusters and unsupervised learning, groups or clusters. The meta search engine clusty (http://clusty.com/) uses clusters that I find valuable. There are similar clusters at the bottom of the Google SERPs.

There should also be more focus on precision and recall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall) and efficiency.

Links:



http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/html/htmledition/evaluation-in-information-retrieval-1.html
http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/html/htmledition/contents-1.html

[Dinghus]

I would just like it if Google (and the rest) would use the age of the page as a ranking criteria. How many times have you searched for something like coldfusion, or php, or whatever and the first results up are like 10 years old? I go searching for "how to do something in coldfusion 8" and get results from CF4 for crying out loud.

BUT back to your topic, when I do Yahoo searches on my celphone I get exactly what you are talking about. It starts with graphics with a couple of pictures, goes to websites etc etc. So your idea is already here and I think all search engines will start classifying them by type. After all, if I want an article about ColdFusion I can skip over all the graphics of the antarctica.

[chandrika]

I would just like it if Google (and the rest) would use the age of the page as a ranking criteria. How many times have you searched for something like coldfusion, or php, or whatever and the first results up are like 10 years old? I go searching for "how to do something in coldfusion 8" and get results from CF4 for crying out loud.


You know in Google, if you click on "show options" at the top of the results, you can choose to search within a specific date range.

I find myself using that more and more lately,not always successfully. I was looking for an old driver the other day and like you was just getting the latest model pages, but when I used the date range and searched between 2003-4 , I did find what I wanted.

I am just thinking how much there will be eventually online, say 50 years from now. Although I expect the growth will slow down because less people will learn html etc in the future, due to in the past to have a "home page" you had to learn some stuff, but now as people can just go on facebook or twitter, so they do not get so into the mechanics, which I think will slow the growth of the internet.

Maybe once a year Google could cache itself, so that you could go and search "Google 2001" or "Google 2010", like a total mirror of a days search results frozen in time, forever there for reference. I am not sure if that is what the date range results are, but I dont think so, they appear to be based on publish date, which isnt always correct.

[kgun]

After all, if I want an article about ColdFusion I can skip over all the graphics of the antarctica.
So you do not know that you can search

ColdFusion -antarctica

[morestar]

You know in Google, if you click on "show options" at the top of the results, you can choose to search within a specific date range.

Interesting. Before I posted this I did a number of searches (whilst not logged into my Google account) and couldn't for the life of me get the Options to show up. I knew they were there but was under the impression they only displayed when you are logged in.

Either way, I search cold fusion (not logged in) and the options were there. I clicked on them and saw the following options:

Images
Videos
News
Blogs
Updates
Books
Discussions

and

Latest
Past 24 hours
Past week
Past year
Specific date range

Now that's fine and dandy but I'm wondering if a time will come when the organic results pages will display that was as well - and why not? It certainly makes searching and finding much easier - it seems.

It seems the discussion link does display forums too.

:-P

[morestar]

So you do not know that you can search

ColdFusion -antarctica

I think the great majority of searchers - world wide do not know of the negative operator nor it's usage unless they've dug a little deep into Google's capabilities. I believe most people simply type and search and type again until they get what they want or go somewhere else.

[kgun]

I think the great majority of searchers - world wide do not know of the negative operator nor it's usage unless they've dug a little deep into Google's capabilities. I believe most people simply type and search and type again until they get what they want or go somewhere else.



Yes, sadly enough. Most people don't vary their search terms.
http://www.googleguide.com/ A very good site.

[cg0404]

Organization would definitely help, I like that idea. We do spend a ton of time searching for things. How is Google to know exactly, but organizing or having a listing on the side as in Bing, providing categories to further the search. Even Bing could use some improvement, but it is a great start!