Search Beyond Search

Panelists: Mark Drummond (Wowd), Gil Elbaz (Factual), Ilya Segalovich (Yandex)
Moderator: Esther Dyson (EDventure)

"The future of search is a number of very different verbs"

"Search is dead. Filtering is everything."

This panel on search has none of the major "traditional" search players like Google or Bing, but instead features interesting smaller players like tech startups. And so the panelists dive right into the thick of things.

Search is changing away from Google-style reference search, and more to social search that is based on users' social graphs. One of the key challenges in search today is, says Ilya Segalovich: Will search engines ever truly understand context?

Are we going to have a bunch of targeted, domain-specific search engines or are we going to have a single box, and that search engine knows what you're looking for? There are several trends and forces at work. On the one hand, app-based search can be powerful for verticals. On the other hand, structured, semantic data - still in a relatively early stage - has big potential for horizontal search.

Search has become pretty good already, but it's nowhere near a solved problem. Search engines still need learn how to delivering the most relevant answer based on context. The way there should be interesting as many companies take different approaches and paths.