Thursday, May 21, 2009

Will Google Become the Perfect Search Engine?

Back in November, I wrote a post for the Resolution Media blog recapping the launch of Google Search Wiki and speculating what the perfect search engine might look like.

"Imagine being able to toggle between SERPs customized based on your past history/pref's and SERPs based on those results selected by others. Taking it one step further, imagine a slider bar (ala SideStep) that allows you to refine results based on the preferences of various groups including:

• Your Facebook friends
• People in the US (or any other country, city, state, zip)
• All people 25-54 (or any other demo)
• All women (or men)"

Perhaps my vision is nearing reality. As scooped by Google Operating System, the Google blog post announcing recent updates (such as, my favorite, the Wonder Wheel) revealed the screenshot below that shows their "initial concepts for the Search Options panel."

Click Image for Larger View

Google People Search

One of the features that Google Operating System picked up on was "grouping search results by people" which was essentially what I was getting at with my idea for crowdsourced search results.

I'm still bullish on the potential for slicing and dicing listings based on what sites certain groups liked best as voted by their clicks. Although, as last night's American Idol reminded us, people's queries and clicks don't always represent their true sentiment.

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