By Ali Davar

Web search has evolved from a mere curiosity in the 1990s to a central part of our everyday lives. Since this transformation, searching the Web hasn’t significantly changed. Has search hit its maturity phase, with only incremental improvements to come? Or are there significant leaps of innovation still ahead? Looking at recent innovations in search, the question is not whether there will be a major shift but what it will consist of.

Some believe that search is essentially solved because Google generally finds what they search for. But the relationship between the problem of finding content on the Web and its technological solution is more complex than this. Now that we are used to the benefits of high-quality keyword search, it seems obvious that search was broken until Google came along. But in the 1990s, most of the large search and portal companies passed on the opportunity to buy Google, and several prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists passed on the opportunity to invest. The prevailing view was that search was “good enough”. Similarly, today we should challenge this assumption.

What then are the potential big innovations in search? The most promising opportunity in our view is in the area of Web discovery. There is a vast amount of high-value information that users miss simply because they don’t know it’s out there and therefore don’t know to go searching for it in the first place. Traditional search is not designed to help them with this because it depends so heavily on a person’s ability to know what they need. Discovery bridges the gap by focusing on the user rather than just the keywords they enter. By learning about your unique interests and needs, a discovery engine can provide you high-value information without being asked about something specific. It is an ideal complement to traditional search—expect the major search engines to eventually have some discovery capability.

Another emerging direction is “real-time” search. This type of search focuses on the right now: type in “earthquake” and expect to find out what happened an hour ago, not an analysis of the 1946 Vancouver Island earthquake. Real-time search is increasingly being associated with Twitter, the upstart service that lets users post 140-character updates of their daily lives. The remarkable thing about this innovation is that it stems not from technological advances, but almost entirely from a new conception of the user experience.

At the other end of the spectrum lie the often computationally intensive semantic search technologies, which aim to improve search by helping computers understand the meaning of language through its structure. Some believe that because Google finds us most of what we search for, semantic search can only help us with the fraction of Web searches we are unsatisfied with. However, if semantic search lives up to its promise, we will be able to search for things we previously didn’t think possible.

It’s tempting to believe that the search problem is fixed because of just how far we have come—anyone who recalls the pain of navigating Yahoo’s topical directory will attest to this. Yet just as we believed that search was “good enough” before Google, we see history repeating itself now. Nascent areas of development such as discovery tell us that there is still much low-hanging fruit. Semantic search points toward possible fundamental technological improvements to search. And the tremendous success of Twitter demonstrates that change does not even have to come at the hand of significant new technologies. Keyword search as we now know it will likely remain central to our search experience for many years to come, but it is certain that what we mean when we say “search” will evolve to encompass a much broader and more interesting set of technologies and experiences.

Ali Davar is the CEO of Worio, a Vancouver-based startup creating a new category of personalized Web search: discovery. Davar founded Worio in 2005, while attending law school at the University of British Columbia. Worio has obtained $2 million in angel funding, along with grants from Canada’s National Research Council and Precarn.