Jeremy Zawodny has posted predictions for 2004. I think the predictions about personalized search are interesting. I'm not sure what Jeremy is thinking about personalized search, but I have a few ideas of my own.
What if I published a list of sites that I trusted, and search listings where ordered by "distance" from the list of sites I trust. I'm thinking about this more in terms of relevance than in terms of trust. The sites on my trusted list are relevant to me. If those sites link to other sites that are close in terms of subject matter, then the sites that are "closer" to me should be more relevant. At least that's one theory. Such a scheme also has the advantage of being "decentralized," in the sense that everyone will have a different collection of trusted sites. That would make search engine spamming more difficult.
Another big improvement in search engine technology would use feedback from Listing Page N to improve the relevance of entries on Listing Page N+1. Instead of links at the bottom of Page 1 to take you to Page 2, Page 3, and so on, there would be a link next to each entry in Page 1. If I didn't see a relevant entry on Page 1, I would click on the 'next page' link next to the entry that was the most relevant. Hopefully, that feedback to the search engine would assist it to display more relevant entries on Page 2. Feedback from Page 2 would yield still more relevant entries on Page 3, and so forth.
Posted by Doug Sauder at December 10, 2003 10:31 PM