The document discusses emerging trends in search technologies, including new ways of crawling, indexing, and ranking webpages. It outlines Google's development of distributed indexing using links clicked (WOWD), information extraction from sensors in mobile devices and self-driving cars, and knowledge panels/cards to provide contextual information to users. Ranking is moving towards prioritizing entities and their relationships rather than just text, as well as factors like user authority, freshness of news articles, and website quality signals. The future of search involves understanding aspects and relationships between topics rather than just individual pages or strings.

1. The Future of Search
SearchLove Boston
May 20th, 2013
Bill Slawski

2. It’s been a good week for Science Fiction –
Space Oddity in Zero Gravity
http://youtu.be/KaOC9danxNo

3. Amit Singhal on his Childhood Star Trek
Computer Dreams at Google I/O
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pmPa_KxsAM

4. “Hello Computer”
Amit also introduced his portion of the
developer’s conference as “The Death of
Search”

5. Should we be Afraid? Concerned?
We should be aware!

6. The Future and Change Permeates
the World Around us
David Foster Wallace on Water
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmpYnxlEh0c

7. Future Shock is the stress we
feel because of change
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ghzomm15yE

8. “Tell me more of this change
management.”
A former supervisor of mine, hearing “change
management,” became worried that he was
being replaced by computers.

9. Matt Cutts Recently warned people to not
take patents too seriously
What's the latest SEO misconception that you would like to put to rest?

10. Let’s Ignore Matt’s Warning!
Patents give the owners a right to
prevent others from carrying out the
invention (manufacturing or marketing)
but not from learning from the invention.
WIPO on Using patent information for policy and business analysis

11. Bill Slawski
 Writes about patents and takes them very
seriously     
 Reads Science Fiction and Patents like
Cereal Boxes
 Works for Webimax as a Senior SEO
Consultant – Blogs at SEObytheSea.com

12. What’s New?
New Ways to Crawl & New
Indexing Approaches
New Ways to Search
New Ways to Rank

13. Old Crawling and Indexing
Approaches
• Googlebot
• Streetview Cars
• XML Sitemaps
• Canonical Link Elements
• Pagination Markup
• HREFLANG
Markup/Sitemaps

14. New Crawling and Indexing Approaches
 WOWD Distributed Indexing
 Open Learning Information
Extraction
 Mobile Devices and (Lots of)
Sensors
 Robots and Cloud-Based
Object Recognition
 Self-Driving Cars and (Lots of)
Sensors
 Glass and Life Streaming

15. WOWD
System and Method for Recommendation of Interesting Web Pages
Based on User Browsing Actions
Google Acquired
Patents from
WOWD that
Use a Distributed
Index Based on
Links People
Click Upon

16. Open Language Learning for
Information Extraction
Open information extraction from the Web

17. Mobile Devices and Sensors
Methods and apparatus for prediction and modification of behavior
in networks
Barometer, Thermometer,
Hygrometer, Accelerometer,
Magnometer, GPS, Bluetooth,
Ambient Light, Proximity,
Compass, Gyroscope,
Microphone

18. Cloud-Based Robots
Methods and systems for providing instructions to a robotic device
Methods and systems for autonomous robotic decision making

19. Self Driving Cars and Sensors
“The communication is two-way, so in addition to downloading Google’s
maps, the car can upload its map to Google. If several self-driving cars
upload maps showing the new construction barrels, for example, Google
can update the map it sends to other cars, letting those cars anticipate the
hazard.” - Yes, Driverless Cars Know the Way to San Jose

20. Heads Up Display Google Glass
Method and Apparatus for Enabling a Searchable History of Real-World
User Experiences

21. Searching
 Facebook Graph Search
 Knowledge Panels
 Knowledge Cards and Google Now
 Search Plus Your World
 Agent Rank

22. Facebook Graph Search
Default Structured Search Queries on Online Social Networks

23. Knowledge Panels
Providing Knowledge Panels With Search Results

24. Knowledge Cards
Providing digital content based on expected user behavior

25. Search Plus Your World
Following Online Social Behavior to Enhance Search Experience (Bing)
Social Network Powered Search Enhancements (Bing)
Presenting Social Search Results (Google)

26. Agent Rank
Agent Rank - Version 1
Google’s Agent Rank Patent Application - My 2007 Write-up of it in Search Engine
Land
Agent Rank - Version 2 – Portability
Agent Rank - Version 3 – Not all Endorsements are Equal
The identity of individual agents responsible
for content can be used to influence search
ratings…. Multiple agents can make
contributions to a single web page where
each agent is only associated to the content
that the agent provided.

27. Ranking
 Updated News (less tradition)
 Entities for the Win!
 User Rank
 Quality rating and Re-Ranking
(Panda and More)

28. Updated News
Systems and methods for improving the ranking of news articles – 1st Version
Systems and methods for improving the ranking of news articles – 2nd Version
Systems and methods for improving the rankings of news articles – 3rd Version
When Google clusters
News articles around a
topic, it picks representative
stories for each cluster.
The claims section of the
latest version no longer
seems to favor Traditional
media sources…

29. Entities For The Win
Identifying Aspects for Web-Search Queries
Aspector combines two sources of information to compute
aspects. We discover candidate aspects by analyzing query
logs, and cluster them to eliminate redundancies.
We then use a mass-collaboration knowledge base (e.g.,
Wikipedia) to compute candidate aspects for queries that occur
less frequently and to group together aspects that are likely to
be “semantically” related.

30. User Rank
Ranking User Generated Web Content
• How relevant a response/comment might be from the 1st
person to something that the 2nd person posted,
• How original a post/comment/piece of content submitted to
the network might be compared to other content items,
• How much “coverage” or broadening of a topic a piece of
content might add to the network, based upon uncommon
terms in the post or comment or reply,
• How “rich” the content item might be, (Does it include
multimedia/rich media content) or
• The timeliness of a content item, such as a quick comment in
response to a post.

31. Quality Rating
Website quality signal generation

32. Take Aways
 Read Patents – Don’t make assumptions 
 Don’t be Afraid of Change (SEO is Dead, Again)
 Understand New Data (Sensor) Collection
Approaches
 Make Pages about “Things not Strings” and
understand aspects and relationships between
them.
 Ranking will be increasingly about authority and
quality online

33. Thank You
Bill Slawski
@bill_slawski
bill@seobythesea.com
bslawski@webimax.com
http://www.seobythesea.com
http://www.webimax.com