The Future Of Search

We touched briefly on the topic of how search is measured. Interestingly, after I interviewed Shashi, Danny Sullivan posted a rant about things being done by Yahoo! that end up manipulating the comScore search market share figures. Shashi and I did discuss the topic (but not Dannys post since it was not out at the time) of how search volume is counted. He argues that search volume tracking should be more robust than it is today. If someone gets a search query result embedded in content without ever touching a search box, and then they engage with it, is that a search?

For that matter, is the total number of queries the best way to measure a search engine? What about user engagement metrics, such as number of searches it takes a user to find what they want, or the time the user spends engaged with search result content. These ideas, while conceptually interesting, remain hard to measure.

Overall, it was a great look at how Yahoo! views the evolution of search.