Matt Cutts Talks About The Next Generation Of Search

Okay, another Matt Cutts post here. Read/Write Web recently interviewed Matt Cutts, one of the public faces of Google (although not officially so). The topic was about the next generation of search.

Google sure has come a long way from simply having a search engine technology that other companies licensed (like how Yahoo! relied on Google search in the late 1990’s). Today, Google is still running two steps ahead of the pack when it comes to innovative search techniques and ideas. Here are some highlights.

Personalization. Social bookmarkers and social news sites have always considered personalization to be their strong point. That’s because a user is essentially a part of a group of “friends,” and everytime he searches for something within the network, priority is given to results from your friends–the closer they are in terms of degrees of separation, the higher rank the results get.

For Google, however, it’s still the bigger picture. Matt considers localization as a type of personalization. Searching for a pizza joint contact number should give you the details of the restaurant in your city (or at least country). Being logged in to your Google account also helps, since Google analyzes your searching and clicking patterns and tailor-fits results according to these. (These quite distort the concept of pagerank and other SEO concepts, though).

Semantics. Google search has always been thought to be about keywords, as opposed to other search engines that let you use natural language instead. For instance, instead of searching for “pizza new york” you would say “give me the telephone numbers of pizza delivery joints in new york.” But Matt thinks that Google’s search has been friendly with semantics from the start. He credits its vast amount of data–and of course not to mention the secret Google algorithms–for understanding what a user is trying to say exactly.

Vertical search. Matt says Google is definitely going beyond blog search, especially with the Google custom search engine (which we proudly use here on Google Tutor, with our Research Google). This means more and more people can create their custom searches, and define URLs, parameters, and even their own “pagerank” for these sites.

Structured content. This is another one of Google’s strengths, as Matt thinks, particularly with Google Base. The data that people input onto Google Base might soon be plugged into Google search itself, and that might have interesting applications. User-contributed Google, anyone?

Spam. Then of course, Matt discussed his expertise, which is fighting spam. He says Google is doing better at fighting spam today than a couple of years ago. But one major area they would like to improve in would be internationalization–that is fighting spam in search results and email in as many languages as possible.

Other search technologies. While Matt was obliged not to mention any competitors (as a Google company policy), he does mention some technologies that he thinks might be worth exploring, such as visual search or visualization, artificial intelligence, clustering, query refinements, video search and the like.