TEDxBoston: The Future Of Search vs. Seeing The Future With Search
by Pete Bell
TEDx conferences, the local offshoots of TED, are more experimental in format than the classic TED talk. An innovation of TEDxBoston is the “Adventure” — an immersive trip that puts the big ideas of TED into the context of a physical location. This year, there were nearly two dozen, including a tour of Dean Kamen’s Willy Wonka-like DEKA factory, a helicopter flight over the city, a re-creation of Paul Revere’s ride on bicycles with Olympian Nicole Freedman, and a visit to the Suffolk County lock-up with its forward-thinking sheriff.
Endeca hosted an audience of 75 for one of the Adventures, The Future of Search panel, at our headquarters. And if you wanted any more evidence that search is still red hot, it turned out to be one of the most requested TEDxBoston Adventures.
Boston is a perfect city to assemble a search panel, and the mix for this one included:
- Justin Boyan, VP Data Integration, ITA Software
- Pawan Deshpande, CEO, HiveFire
- Don Dodge, Developer Advocate, Google
- Boris Evelson, VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
- Adam Ferrari, CTO, Endeca
Paul Sonderegger moderated a wide ranging tour not just of search, but of searching – the human activity of seeking out information and applying it to decisions. His questions covered 3 broad areas:
- People and personal life: How is search affecting our privacy? How do disparities in access to search play out around the globe?
- Business and work life: Is search making us more productive? How are the best companies using search to gain competitive advantage?
- Government and the citizen: What is the impact of search on regulation? How is search making goverment more transparent?
The night ended with predictions from each panelist about which aspects of search will matter most in the next 3-5 years. So what is the future of search? Social graphs, location-based search, semantic web, the convergence of search and analytic technologies, and richer content aggregation.
But earlier on, Paul had another interesting question about the future of search: With better search, could we have foreseen the financial crisis? Or to generalize Paul’s question, can we use search to see the future?
The search box is imbued with nearly magical powers these days. But if you stop to think about it, even with all that power, search is rarely thought of as a crystal ball to the future. Contrast that, with, say, business intelligence tools, which are widely used for forecasting and predictive modeling. Oracle even named themselves after a seer. So why the difference?
Let’s re-ask Paul’s question a different way: With better BI tools, could we have foreseen the financial crisis? Asked this way, I think the answer is obvious. We didn’t need better tools, we needed better people using the tools.
That complementary pairing of person and computer is the heart of HCIR, or Cyborg BI. Readers of Search Facets likely already think of search as a conversation with the data, akin to BI. Yet sampling the audience at the panel, most people outside the biz still have a mental model of the search box as a tool for fact finding, or query/response. To paraphrase William Gibson, the future of search is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
on August 11, 2010 at 6:44 am
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