What is the future shape of the search?

Contextual search is an intelligent and personalized search for user backgrounds, hobbies, and environments such as comprehensive consideration , and Internet of Things is the two key factor in understanding search evolution. In the future, users will no longer need to actively search for information, the need for information will be the initiative to find us.

But the search equation should also include third factor: Intelligent software agent, also known as "intelligent search robot" or "Smart personal Butler". The smart agent not only predicts the information the user needs, but can perform events based on the information without user concern, "caring for" the day-to-day work and life of the user.

The age of "intelligent search Robot"

The "Smart Search robot" technology was born a long time ago, but the focus of the technology in the early stages of development was to create automated task-handling software to help the business of the Internet, such as the "crawler" (web crawler) technology used by search engines to find and index Web pages. At the same time, researchers in this field have always had an ultimate goal, that is, to give the machine the ability to think, in the future, more and more people will need the human brain to operate the work and tasks entrusted to the machine.

Finally, more than 10 years after the birth of this technology, we came to the real sense of the era of intelligent search robot.

Today, the great environment of the internet world has changed dramatically. The most obvious is the take-off of the mobile internet, mobile devices are beginning to fill the corners of our lives, and secondly, a variety of network services more and more, and more and more intelligent technology to break through the bottleneck; the last and most important point is the rise of big data, The network has accumulated enough data for our intelligent robots to find, reference and use, thus "forward-looking" and "speculative" to carry out the work required by mankind.

Dr Moshe BenBassat, CEO of software provider ClickSoftware, can be said to be a research expert in this field, and in his view, in the future, the personal intelligence agent, Dr. Bassatt, calls it "personal butler." will be able to help plan and implement people's daily work.

Intelligent "Personal Butler" is more efficient than human beings

Dr. Ben Bassatt cited an example for example, a company's technical support staff to open the Smartphone service application, check out today's work plan, the first task is to visit a bank in the center of the customer, he slipped a few mobile phone screen, find the address, and then from the navigation application to find the route map, set out. At the bank, the employee turned on his cell phone to find the bank account's contact, made a phone call, and the customer contact came downstairs to take him to the office. Unexpectedly, after the customer's office on the 17 floor, the technical support staff found that they had left a replacement part in the car, so he had to go downstairs and get back to the car.

In this case, Dr. Bassatt predicted that the technical support staff would spend 7-12 minutes looking for and using the information and functions he needed on the phone, and that every day, the employee had a lot of similar tasks, much of the time wasted on "mechanized" use of the device.

However, in a world full of intelligent personal stewards, the above scenario will be: a company's technical support staff to open the service application of the mobile phone to see today's work schedule, immediately received the first task notice: Visit a bank in the city of customers, "Personal Butler" and then ask him if he needs map navigation, click "Yes" Then he hit the road immediately, approaching the destination shown on the map, "the housekeeper" automatically calls the contact of the bank's client on the phone to notify the other technical support staff that they are on their way, and when the technical support employee gets off the bus, the housekeeper "perceives" a replacement part missing from his toolbox, reminding him to take it out of the car.

Like Dr. Benbassat, "housekeeper" will change the way we work by changing the way we define "Internet search", "proactive search software agents make it no longer necessary to waste time searching for information, they anticipate our needs, and then send us the information we need. As the technology matures, the information sent to us is becoming more accurate and practical.

Now, with the advent of contextual search tools such as Google today, which take into account the location of users and the information they are doing to provide more accurate and useful information, there is no doubt that this represents a significant step towards the "forward-looking search" software Butler technology.

"Human-computer communication" is still a problem

Making machines truly understand human natural language is still the biggest challenge of software butler Technology. After all, the software housekeeper is only relying on human-written procedures to do the work, human beings have a lot of flexible "skills", "common sense" and so on, and when we tell the software housekeeper "I'm looking for pizza", the software housekeeper may give you a map of the nearby pizza shop. It's also possible to search out a bunch of pizza pictures for you to see.

At present, while voice-assistant software such as Apple's Siri is a flaw in both speech recognition and human-computer communication, as these two aspects improve, it's not hard to imagine that Siri or Google Now can perform more functions than "response requirements." Once the problem of effective communication is overcome, the Internet will be able to provide us with the experience of "real person assistants" to take care of our daily work and life.

Do users want to search themselves?

Whether it's searching the Internet, your Inbox, or your own device, it's becoming unnecessary for your users to work or live. Search means not only the use of Google search the vast expanse of the Internet Information Sea, but also need to search the user's own data and related information. Imagine if your partner is having a meeting at work and can't pick up the kids at school. You no longer need to go through multiple calls, text messages, or emails to make sure your replacement partner is picking up the kids on time, and your software housekeeper will analyze your goals and status and coordinate your plans. To provide a perfect solution, all you have to do is click "Agree", and the software Butler immediately starts to act.

With automated software stewards, contextual search, a wealth of information stored on our devices, and Internet of things, search technology will undoubtedly become more useful, effective and convenient. Apple Siri and the contextual search tool Google now begin to combine these technologies if things go well, as mentioned above, we don't have to spend time and experience looking for information, and the information itself will come to us, and how the Internet business world will compete in that time leaves too much room for imagination.