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.

I came across a very interesting interview with Udi Manber, the Google vice president in charge of search quality, about how search has developed over the years.

It’s easy to forget that even five years ago, it wasn’t obvious to most people to turn to a search box on the internet to find what they are looking for. Now, search is the most natural starting point for so many of us.

For Udi, it was all very obvious;

“It was very clear that to have an information revolution, it’s not enough to store the information and move it around, you have to find it.”

And what’s more,

“We are finding that user expectations grow. The kind of searches people do now are more complicated than the kinds they were doing five years ago. People expect a lot more from us.”

So, what are the predictions about the future?

For Udi, its universal search that is “more in-depth, easier, and allowing you to control more of what you’re looking for, giving you more input, finding more things”.

For us, we think local search will continue to develop and in our eyes, the shift to mobile devices will change and shape user experiences the most. The biggest challenge will be keeping up with these expectations.

You can read Udi’s interview here

Yet again, the predicted power of mobile local search has been highlighted, this time by Frazier Miller, general manager of Yahoo!Local.

Not only has he predicted that by 2010, mobile phone are expected to outnumber PCs by three to one, he also believes mobile users will be demanding local information the most.

This means:

“We have a perfect storm brewing between user demand, advertising desire for targeting and mobile evolution that’s going to make this an incredibly rich arena for the next few years.”

You can read more about the growth of mobile local search here.

With predictions that almost 30% of the global mobile users will be using local mobile search services by 2013, Windsor Holden, principle analyst with Juniper, has summed it up perfectly:

The beauty of the mobile is that people have the handset with them all the time. From a local search perspective, that is almost a gold-mine.

Gone are the days when you have to be stuck at desk at home or work to be looking for local services and businesses on the internet, so it comes as no surprise that more and more people are relying on their mobiles to find local information.

So what are the next steps?

It will be interesting to see how many businesses target their advertising and optimise their websites for mobiles. If it’s true that response rates to advertising supporting mobile local search will be significantly higher than on general mobile web search, such forward thinking businesses will find they could gain a considerable head start on their competitors.

Yet the report is tinged with caution.

Despite predictions that local search is expected to account for 43% of mobile search advertising revenues between 2008 and 2013, the report refers to advertising overload and that;

In the end it will be the quality of the user experience that will be of paramount importance.

This could be the biggest stumbling block of any progress. Mobile handsets are not ideal devices for local search and attempts to format web for mobile phones are not yet up to scratch. Connections are poor, downloads are slow and with the information rarely presented in a mobile friendly format, “user experience” could hit an all time low. Hardly a glowing reference is it?

Don’t get me wrong, local mobile search is undoubtedly one to keep an eye out for in the future and with the strength of the content of locally based directories being tipped as the key to success, we’re well prepared for the challenge already. I just wonder how long users’ patience will last until technology catches up with the latest demands.