Infoserve Group

No doubt many of you will have read in recent weeks about Google’s 10^th birthday and the profound impact that it has had on our lives. Like our previous post about the history and future of local search, it’s hard to take time out to consider where we were a decade a go – and even more so, where we may be in another 10 years time.

Google has certainly shaped the way we search for information in the last decade; it has dominated the market, Google Adwords advertising has transformed how businesses can target their consumers and now Google Maps will be a huge source of information for users and business owners alike.

Can anyone envisage anything that will have such a big an influence on shaping our search patterns in the next 10 years? Various predictions have been circulating:

• - will social networking sites increasingly shape how people search for information about people and organisations?
• - can rival search engines, such as Yahoo! or even the new kid on the block, Cuil, challenge Google?
• - will comparison sites be used more and more to help us drill down on how products and services compare across the board, not only in terms of price but also consumers’ reviews?
• - finally, one of our predictions: will local search dominate our thinking? (particularly that of mobile local search, which you can read all about here.)

For SMEs, it’s a fast paced environment to keep up-to-date with and will be even more so in the coming years as technology improves. It’s important to think ahead about how your consumers may be searching for you in the future, so take that time out now to consider how best to market your business.

Tags: Google, Local Search

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Google, Local Search, Mobile Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.